‘A debt never dies’: Navigating trust and betrayal in southeastern Nigeria

In southeastern Nigeria, Igbo-speaking people commonly assert that “a debt never dies.” In anthropology, it is well established that debts contribute to constituting social relations. Whether related to money or not, debt has wide social significance and invites moral and metaphorical interpretations. The Igbo provide a particularly salient case for exploring the multidimensional implications of debt because they regularly deploy the concept across a range of domains well beyond the businesses for which they are renowned. In honor of Peter Geschiere, this paper focuses on debt in southeastern Nigeria as a vehicle to examine sociality and its underbelly. Several ethnographic examples of debt are presented and analyzed drawing on Geschiere’s insights to illuminate and explain what can otherwise appear to be paradoxical tensions and connections between cooperation and conflict, trust and betrayal, and other antinomies integral to everyday life.