COWRIES, A CURRENCY THAT MEETS VIOLENT RESISTANCE

 THE SMALL, LIGHT SHELLS FROM ASIA
SPREAD THROUGHOUT WEST AFRICA
(Toward 1780-1850)

Transmaldavian airlines / Internet

• They eliminate kings' control 

of the most primitive economies,
and rulers may oust traders
who try to impose them

Hausa are expelled from Macina (Mali), Oyo (southern Nigeria) and Ashanti (Ghana), toward 1800. The sources do not give a reason, but in Ashanti they are driven away because "They did not know how to used the weights for weighing gold. So the Ashanti told them, if you don't want to learn how to use them, you can go." "

-- Atta Kwadwo, Keeper of the Royal Stool, Kumasi

The Hausa have traded in Ashanti for half a century and know how to use the weights. But demanding cowries defies the king, whose weights are one-third heavier than others.

• They appear after civil wars

that stronger political power follows

In Bornu, cowry use coincides with overthrowing the most ancient nobility (in 1846), as the Henrich Barth explicitly states.

-- Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1855, II, 55

Explorers rarely give such information directly, because they do not understand its importance. One grasps the link by connecting different parts of their narratives, or by comparing accounts of the same place at different times (as the next chapter shows).

The struggle between Tofanga and the traders

and Gnapon's stronger power 

are typical of the change that cowries bring. 

End of this chapter.

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Next chapter,

IV, 2.
Same transformation, much wider scale