The Secret Society and the Seizing of Children

The passage only makes sense if one recognizes that debtors were also, owing to their membership in the secret societies, collectors. The seizing of a child is a reference to the local practice of panaring current throughout west africa,. by which creditors would simply sweep into the debtors community with a group of armed men and seize anything people, goods, domestic animals could be easily carried off. Or he would make a raid on some neighbouring village, seize a child and sell him or her to the same willing purchaser. A neighbour's goats or children would do just as well, since the whole point was to bring social pressure on whoever owed the money.