Unsanctioned Wealth; or, The Productivity of Debt in Northern Cameroon

Je lance dans le monde un livre qui va trouver bien des résistences. Eh quoi! vont s'écrier la foule de petits esprits, prétendez-vous ériger en profession avouée, en profession honorable, l'art affreux, l'art exécrable de faire des dettes, et l'art bien plus exécrable encore de ne point les payer? . . . Eh bien! petits esprits, cerveaux étroits, vues courtes, apprenez que l'art de faire des dettes et de ne point les payer est l'un des éléments de l'ordre social.

Jacques-Gilbert Ymbert, L'art de faire des dettes

This essay is a reflection on debt. Debt seems to be the flip side of wealth; that is, not having enough. And yet I would like to consider the ways in which debt is plenitude and not simply lack. Perhaps economic debt is not just the constraint of society, the rubber stamp of a certain social status: being liable, a liability. Evidently, if debt can be described as a social relation, indebtedness involves a certain sociability: the gift is a debt (Mauss 1950; Derrida 1991). However, the simple affirmation of the social constitution of debt relations and debt itself runs the risk of a functionalist trap. Merely pointing out the logical emergence of the social constitution of debt in a given context is tantamount to declaring its functional nature in human society. In the remarks that follow, I prefer to explore how debt can be a mode of either affirming or denying sociability. In that spirit, I ask a series of questions: What is the difference between debt that disturbs and what one might call socially sanctioned debt? How is it that some forms of wealth are socially sanctioned in spite of their origins in debt relations while others are denounced quite flatly as "debt," portrayed as a negative economic indicator, a disruption in the order of production and exchange? And in what contexts does debt mark out not negative space in the social imaginary but rather a critical and perhaps strategic stance?

Ultimately, these questions are oriented toward the matter of the productive nature of debt and debt relations, as opposed to their significance as merely owing. They are inspired by the situation in Cameroon today, and in Africa more generally, which forces us to ask how debt and liability square with productivity. As has been demonstrated elsewhere (Bayart 1989; Vallée 1989, 1999), debt relations are instrumental to the construction of an "extraverted" political economy. Debt is an essential mediation between the state and the global economy: an important resource for political and economic agents, debt establishes the credits that are new rents for redistribution in the national economy and for the management of internal conflict. Debt thus generates both economic and political rents, or resources and wealth that derive from commercial, political, and financial relations as opposed to agricultural or industrial production. Debt-seeking, like rent-seeking, is an economic and political strategy.

And yet, beyond instrumentalist tactics, the productivity of debt can also be understood in terms of a primary relation that puts debtor-creditor relations at the very base of social relations more generally, and hence at the heart of productive associations. This means positing debt as a fundamental social fact, as already there. In the social sciences, debt is most often construed as an economic or juridical category. And when debt is apprehended as a social phenomenon—social debt—it is still most often construed as something contracted, exterior to a primary, original situation. Debt happens to someone or to some people, but it does not constitute them; it is, then, a perversion or deviation in human relations—an abnormal situation that needs to be rectified.

Since the "return" to Marcel Mauss in anthropological circles during the 1980s, the idea that debt is constituted through "the gift" (le don) has been reiterated and refined so that debt relations are...