Abstract
When Northern Ghana was colonized at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the central economic innovations on the part of the colonial government was the introduction of British coinage. Many of the local people, however, were slow to accept the new currency, preferring to use the pre-existing cowrie currency. Cowries continued to be used for a variety of transactions, in concert with colonial money, into the middle of the century. This can be contrasted with other parts of West Africa where the transition occurred more swiftly. In this chapter, I argue that this can be understood as a contest over “regimes of value” and that, due to the absence of a positive network effect, coins were not able to penetrate the social, political and economic realms inhabited by cowrie shells.
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Notes
- 1.
At independence, Ghana was using the West African pound, which was legal tender in Anglophone West Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, the Gambia, and Sierra Leone. The Ghana Pound was introduced in 1958 by the then ruling Convention People’s Party (CPP), which later introduced the cedi currency in 1965. A number of subsequent governments have, at different times, substituted all of the existing currency notes with “new” cedi notes or withdrawn certain denominations from circulation (Yiridoe 1995, p. 24). The Ghanaian Central Bank is also currently in the process of introducing the world’s first biometric money system (Breckenridge 2010).
- 2.
- 3.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the continuing unsuccessful attempts by the United States Treasury to introduce a dollar coin. Neither the 1979 Susan B. Anthony silver coin nor the 2000 Sacagawea gold coin has been successfully adopted as a circulating currency despite its manifest benefits and an aggressive, expensive marketing campaign (Caskey and St. Laurent 1994, p. 496).
- 4.
During his expedition into the Nigerian hinterland, Lord Lugard had his cowrie loads sorted by size. The loads of small cowries, containing 16 “heads” (32,000 cowries) weighed approximately 76 lbs. By contrast the larger cowries, divided into loads weighing “80 lbs. and more” contained only 7.5 heads, i.e., 15,000 cowries (Lugard 1963, p. 170).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
This military occupation was preceded by forays into the interior by government agents such as George Ekem Ferguson (1974), whose task it was to initiate “treaties of trade and friendship” or “trade and protection” with chiefs in the area.
- 8.
- 9.
Cowries were, however, banned in Asante during the nineteenth century, possibly in a bid to conserve and regulate the distribution of gold (Arhin 1995, p. 99).
- 10.
It should be noted that it is likely that not all of these were in widespread use as currencies in the Sisala area, although a piece of ivory was recovered from the site of Zanbulugu (early twentieth century). Ferguson’s (1974) account refers to all territory north of Asante, which included state-level societies and large market towns not found in the Sisala area.
- 11.
Frederick Lugard was equipped with 336 loads of goods, food, and supplies, 53 of which were cowries, when setting off on his survey mission for the Niger Company (through what is today Nigeria) in 1894. Many of them contained cloth (166 loads), another local currency. These were the currencies that were to be used to buy provisions for the caravan or as gifts to ease their passage. There was one load of specie. During the expedition, the cloth was paid out to the porters with reference to cowries as the unit of value (Lugard 1963, pp. 88, 101, 256).
- 12.
This was partly due to the fact that almost as much silver was circulating in the West African colonies as there was in the whole of Britain. The British Treasury was thus concerned about the possible impact a sudden repatriation of sterling would have on the British economy (Hawkins 1958, p. 345; Hopkins 1970, p. 103; McPhee 1926, pp. 240–241).
- 13.
The currency boards “acted as money changers, exchanging sterling for local currencies issued at fixed exchange rates, and guaranteeing convertibility between colonial currencies and sterling” (Stockwell 1998, p. 101). Note that the seignorage or profit on the currency benefited the British government and that the currency was very much geared toward assisting the functioning of the export market, not the local community (Hawkins 1958, p. 346). Currency issued by the West African Currency Board remained legal tender until July 1959, at which point the currency issued by the independent Bank of Ghana became the only official currency (Stockwell 1998, p. 110).
- 14.
- 15.
Technically, however, the currency issued by the West African Currency Board after 1912 was not easily convertible either as such currency could only be converted at one of the four banking centres in West Africa, and the payment in British sterling would be made in London (Fuller 2009, p. 58; Hogendorn and Gemery 1982, p. 19).
- 16.
An infrastructural case in point would be the outfitting of vending machines to take dollar coins (Caskey and St. Laurent 1994, p. 504).
- 17.
There have been numerous instances historically, worldwide, in which problems have been experienced in providing an adequate supply of low-denomination coins, often because the cost of their production was relatively higher than those for larger denominations (Kuroda 2008, p. 8). The shortage of coins was a common problem throughout all the colonized territories of German, French, and British West Africa, particularly during the First World War. The situation became even more complicated with the devaluation of the mark after the German territories were absorbed into those of the Allies after the World War I (Lawal 2009, p. 64).
- 18.
A modern-day example of this can be seen in the continuing unsuccessful attempts by the United States Treasury to introduce a dollar coin while not withdrawing the dollar bill from circulation. Their Canadian counterparts were able to effect a successful currency substitution by withdrawing their dollar bill and putting the “Loonie” coin into circulation (Caskey and St. Laurent 1994, p. 503).
- 19.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this project was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (grant numbers 6726 and 7587), and the archaeological fieldwork was conducted with permits issued by the Ghana Museum and Monuments Board (GMMB #0136/vol. 11/31 and GMMB #0136/Vol. 11/282) in 2001/2002 and 2007/2009, respectively. I am grateful to the people of Dolbizan, Lilixi, and Gwollu who welcomed me into their communities and assisted with the fieldwork. Thank you to François Richard and Dores Cruz for their insightful comments and advice. Sven Ouzman and Edward Matenga also provided useful comments on an earlier version of the paper. Chriselle Bruwer kindly prepared the map for me.
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Swanepoel, N. (2015). Small Change: Cowries, Coins, and the Currency Transition in the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana. In: Richard, F. (eds) Materializing Colonial Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2633-6_2
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