Nsoa ("dowry "), Money, and Peonage Debt:How the Family Fang Weaved and Unraveled the Colonial Spanish Economy of Guinea
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/endoxa.37.2016.16616Keywords:
Ethnographic history, Spanish Guinea, kinship, money.Abstract
With novel archival material and a review of existing ethnographies I
show that in Spanish Guinea the fusing of the debt economies of bride wealth and the credit economies of labor recruitment betwen 1928 and 1940 led to almost 25,000 Fang men, across Rio Muni, Cameroon and Gabon, to be sought out, paid cash-advances and unloaded with two or three year contracts onto the plantation island of Fernando Poo. The swift rise of this recruitment constellation can be explained by existing paradigms along the lines of the ‘articulacion of modes of production’; but not its sudden collapse. The components and directions, the inscription and circulation of Fang bride wealth, nsoa, made but subsequently also unmade the Spanish colonial economy of labor extraction based on debt-peonaje.
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