In his journal of 16 April 1864, James Thomas, the agent of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) at Gbebe, a town in the north-eastern Yoruba district of Bunu, near the confluence of River Niger, reported that his congregation paid eight bags of cowries for the redemption of a woman and her son to prevent their enslavement for debt. The woman, Elizabeth Alady, was seized during a Nupe raid on an unnamed Yoruba town around 1850 and later taken as a slave wife. In 1864, three years after she gave birth to a son, the master-husband and his freeborn wife were convicted of a crime and ordered to pay the value of two prime slaves in fine. This was an exorbitant fine for the poor couple. Because they had no means of paying what amounted to debt, the court seized Alady and her son and sold them into slavery in order to pay their debt. However, the local CMS redeemed mother and child before the buyer could take them away. This case illustrates an interface between debt and the enslavement of women and children in Yorubaland. Although most accounts of enslavement tactics in nineteenth-century Yorubaland have focused on warfare and kidnapping, many women and children were enslaved for debt.