Money equivalents

In present day Africa, no one needs an explanation of what money is; the only explanation they need is where to get it. However, a long time was required to figure out that the value of all objects can be expressed though one particular object. At first, such a standard of value was something that could either be used in the household or be spent: cattle, arrowheads, iron knives and hoe blades. In Ethiopia, they used blocks of salt for money: in the old times, salt was only brought to tropical Africa from the Sahara or from the African Horn Coast, and it was of high value. Sometimes, other goods were used as money: pieces of fabric, packages of tobacco…

However, money appeared in some places, and it looked more like the present day money, like the ginze of the Looma people in Liberia and Guinea, used up to the end of the 20th century. Their drawback was that any blacksmith could make as much of this money as he had iron, so, it went on gradually devaluating. Sometimes this kind of money had restricted uses – for example, only for marriage fee, like boro among the Guro people and their neighbors. In West and Central Africa, cowrieshells, brought from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean were used quite like the modern money. Some rich people stored such money by big lots.

When the Europeans established trade along the Atlantic coast, they found out that Africans valued metal bracelets and glass beads. Then a whole industry of production of “Venetian glass” beads and standard bracelets called manilla appeared. They were used exclusively as money, as such bracelets were too small to be worn on one’s wrist.

However, all of these riches devaluated when the colonial authorities introduced their francs and pound sterlings.