4.3.6. A DIVISIBLE CURRENCY BRINGS UPHEAVAL

COWRIE SHELLS FROM ASIA SPREAD THROUGHOUT WEST AFRICA

(TOWARD 1780-1850)

Small, light and almost infinitely divisible, they allow ordinary people to engage in commerce, challenging elites' control. 

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• Authorities may oust traders who try to impose them. In Oyo (southern Nigeria) and Ashanti (Ghana), their introduction after about 1800 coincides with expelling the Hausa. In Macina (Mali), Heinrich Barth makes the connection explicitly.
  

--  Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa by Heinrich Barth, ed.1865, III, p. 368.

• In Ashanti Hausa are driven out because "They did not know how to use 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

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

• Or else, they appear after civil wars lead to stronger power. après les guerres civiles qui conduisent à un pouvoir plus robuste. Barth explicitly states that in Bornu cowrie use comes when the old nobility falls (in 1846).

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

*     *

Explorers rarely mention the effects of cowrie introduction, because they do not understand its importance. In the account just cited, it is a detail mentioned in passing.

One grasps the connection by linking

different parts of their narratives,

 uncovering the issues behind stories 

and comparing accounts of the same place 

at different times.

*    *    *

Next:

4.2.7.

Djimini shows the struggle up close