The threat from slavers and the cage of norms conspired to create a spectrum of unfreedom. At one end of the spectrum was the extreme of slavery experienced by Goi. At the other end were obligations and duties you had to accept in order to avoid the hawks. This meant that belonging to a kinship group or society protected you, but didn’t make you free from dominance. If you were a woman, you could be traded for bridewealth and exchanged in a marriage, not to mention the more general subjugation and abuse that was the lot of women in a patriarchal society dominated by chiefs, elders, and men generally.
Within this spectrum of unfreedom were many different types of relationships. One of those, fraught with dominance, can be seen from the story of Bwanikwa, also written down by Campbell. Bwanikwa too was a Luba and her father had a dozen wives. The head wife was a daughter of an important local chief, Katumba. Bwanikwa recalled how
the head wife had just died. According to Luban custom he [her father] was mulcted for death dues. He was ordered to pay three slaves, as compensation for his wife’s death … my father could raise only two.
One of his four daughters had to be handed over to make a third, and I was chosen … When he handed me over to my master, he said to him as we parted: “Be kind to my little daughter; do not sell her to anyone else, and I will come and redeem her.” As my father was unable to redeem me, I was left in slavery.
Bwanikwa’s status was that of a pawn or a pledge, another relationship of subjugation common in Africa. Pawning someone meant giving them to another person for a specific purpose. Often this was payment for some sort of loan, debt, or obligation. But in Bwanikwa’s case it was because her father couldn’t find an extra slave. If he’d found the slave, he could have redeemed Bwanikwa. A pawn was different from a slave; there was no automatic sale, and the expectation was that the situation was temporary. But as Bwankiwa realized, it could merge into slavery. F. B. Spilsbury, a visitor to Sierra Leone in 1805 and 1806, explained:
If a king or any other person goes to a factory, or a slave ship, and procures articles which he is not at that time able to pay for, he sends his wife, sister, or child as a pawn, putting a tally round their necks; the child then runs among the slaves until exchanged.
A related condition was that of a ward. People would send their children as wards to a more powerful family to be brought up in their household. It was a way of keeping them safe, even if they knew this would often involve permanent separation and even if it meant plunging them into a relationship of subservience to their caretakers.
These stories show that people were routinely treated as objects to be pawned and pledged. They often ended up in relationships of dominance. You had to obey the chief, the elders, your caretakers, and, if you were a woman, your husband. You had to follow the customs of your society closely. If you recall Pettit’s definition of being dominated—as living “in the shadow of the other’s presence … in need of keeping a weather eye open for the other’s moods … forced to fawn or toady or flatter in the attempt to ingratiate themselves”—you’ll see this fits it very well.
How did these subservient social statuses emerge? How were they justified? The answer is, again, norms; these relationships evolved as customs accepted by society and supported by beliefs of what was proper and right. People could be pawned and wards had to relinquish their freedom; wives had to obey their husbands; people had to tightly follow their prescribed social roles. Why? Because everybody else expected them to. But at a deeper level, these norms were not completely arbitrary. Though norms are not chosen by anybody and evolve over time from practices and collective beliefs, they are more likely to become widely accepted if they also play a useful role in society, or at least for some people in society. Akan society consented to norms restricting freedoms and the unequal power relations they implied because they reduced people’s vulnerability to Warre. If you were a ward or pawn of an important person, the hawks were less likely to mess with you, and maybe less likely to capture you and enslave you. Another Asante proverb Rattray wrote down summarized their situation even more succinctly: “If you have not a master, a beast will catch you.”
To be free was to be a chicken among the hawks, a prey for the beast. Better to settle for voluntary servitude and give away your liberty.
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The cage of norms isn’t just about preventing Warre. Once traditions and customs become so deeply ingrained, they start regulating many aspects of people’s lives. It’s then inevitable that they will start favoring those with a little more say in society at the expense of others. Even when norms have evolved over centuries, they get interpreted and enforced by these more powerful individuals. Why shouldn’t they tilt the board in their favor and cement their power in the community or the household a little more?
With the exception of a few matriarchal groups, the norms of many stateless societies in Africa have created a hierarchy with men on top and women at the bottom. This is even more visible in the surviving customs in the Middle East and some parts of Asia, for example, among the Pashtuns, whom we mentioned earlier. Pashtun lives are tightly regulated by their ancestral customs, called the Pashtunwali. The Pashtunwali system of law and governance puts a lot of emphasis on generosity and hospitality. But it also creates a stifling cage of norms. One aspect of this is the sanctioning of revenge for a whole host of acts. One of the most common compilations of the Pashtunwali starts by noting that
a Pashtun believes and acts in accordance with the principles of … an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and blood for blood. He wipes out insult with insult regardless of cost or consequence and vindicates his honor by wiping out disgrace with suitable action.
Warre is always around the corner, even if there is a lot of generosity and hospitality aimed at preventing it. This has predictable consequences for everybody’s liberty. But the weight falls more heavily on women. Pashtun norms not only make women subservient to their fathers, brothers, and husbands; they also restrict their every action. Adult women do not work and mostly stay inside. If they go outside, they go covered from head to toe with a burka and must be in the company of a male relative. Punishments for extramarital relations are draconian. The subjugation of women is another facet of the illiberty created by the cage of norms.
Beyond Hobbes
All in all, we are seeing a rather different picture from the one Hobbes painted. The problem in societies where the Leviathan is absent isn’t just uncontrolled violence of “every man, against every man.” Equally critical is the cage of norms, which creates a rigid set of expectations and a panoply of unequal social relations producing a different but no lighter form of dominance.
Perhaps centralized, powerful states can help us achieve liberty? But we have seen that such states are likely to act despotically, repress their citizens, and stamp out liberty rather than promote it.
Are we then doomed to choose between one type of dominance over another? Trapped in either Warre or the cage of norms or under the yoke of a despotic state? Though there is nothing automatic about the emergence of liberty, and it hasn’t been easy to achieve in human history, there is room for liberty in human affairs and this critically depends on the emergence of states and state institutions. Yet these must be very different from what Hobbes imagined—not the all-powerful, unrestrained sea monster, but a shackled state. We need a state that has the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts, and provide public services but is still tamed and controlled by an assertive, well-organized society.