In order to attempt brevity instead of my now-typical ramble-to-shambles (sorry!), I’m going to limit myself to three “media” that I’ve observed here:
- exchange
- entertainment
- engagement
Pretentious disclaimer: I’ve decided these are more conceptual rather than chronological themes I want to tackle with my trips in and out of these places, so one at a time.
First, let’s talk about cash monies. In rifling through my confusing collection of banknotes here, I’ve noticed there is an amazing amount of information you can deduce about a country from its currency. South African rand are aptly hued in a “rainbow nation” of polychrome paperstock, but there’s something definitely a bit odd if you stare at the bills for a bit. There are no people on them. Not Mandela, even though he’s definitely a living legend in the country. But I don’t think it’s the fact that he his still living that is keeping him from currency-based canonization. There are statues and monuments in his name all over ZA. But there are no historical leaders or signature artists or even ur-Citizens/Revolutionaries/Proletarians/Patriots depicted on a ZAR bill. Instead, you have a buffalo or a lion or other big game. After some quick hypothesis-checking with my South Africa colleague, I think the reason for this is that deep political tensions are still boiling beneath the surface of a government that only became post-apartheid in 1994, including the iconographic ownership of national history. Jan Smuts would alienate a huge segment of the population, and Steve Biko another. Even Christiaan Barnard might send too many coded messages about privilege and prominence. Better to stick with innocuously popular animals and elide the surface in establishing even abstract public institutions. Or not.
In Kenya, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s visage is money. Literally. His face is on every denomination of currency, from thousand-shilling banknotes (~$12 USD) to 10-shilling coins (~$0.0125). At one point, his protégé of sorts and the nation’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, put his own face on all the metalware as he consolidated power over the country, while declining to offend the larger-denominated memory of the mythical founding father. In a certain way, this might’ve been a calculated populist tactic to put his face in front of poorer people more often. Given the general cronyism and corruption of Moi’s rule - specifically in the dangerous vein of tribal favoritism - and great dislike many Kenyans developed for him - considering that he more or less sent the country back economically and agriculturally by decades - this was totally reverted to Kenyatta after he lost power in 2003ish, although the Moi coins are still floating in circulation. The current and third ever president, Mwai Kibaki, has yet to strike his own image into coin. Given his sycophantic>technocratic way of doing things, I don’t think he would mind. If a populist Raila Odinga presidency is next in Kenya’s future though, this will definitely not happen. As it stands, the row between the two and questions of electoral transfer precipitated post-election violence in 2008 that killed thousand. This is particularly salient since Kenya more or less exists as a politically confederated tapestry of lineages, languages, and values that quasi-balkanized along ethnic lines during the political violence. The country has just passed a new Constitution that most notably devolves a tremendous amount of power from the executive to the provinces. Whether or not the local governments are prepared is another issue, but the process has been lauded as a promising new beginning based on (relatively) peaceful civil discourse. Except for that whole inviting-the-Sudanese-genocidaire-to-the-ratification-ceremony. I am generally hopeful about the whole thing since I am, after all, writing this critical post from Kenya. This wouldn’t be happening if I was writing from China for a number of economic, cultural, political, and technical reasons that comprise the “Great Firewall” compared to African geopolitics. Anyway, all the banknotes in Kenya are roughly in the same patriotic shades of black, green, and red that you see splashed on people’s cars, and I am hopeful that a panoply of new and peaceful leaders (maybe even Wangari Maathai one day?) will come to appear within these paper borders as this relatively young nation transitions to a thriving democracy.
Ghana redenominated its currency three years ago, and now has one of the strongest unit values on the continent at ~$0.70 USD. On the other hand, the CPI was off the charts last year when electricity was deregulated, and the recent offshore oil finds might prelude rapid inflation and a greater gap between rich and poor more than sustainable development (c.f. Angola, Kano State Nigeria). Ghanaian cedis depict the iconic (figurative-“black”, implicitly pan-Africanist) star of independence on the front of each note, which, in addition to being the emblem of the World Cup semifinalist football team, serves as a reminder of the country’s proud history. It was the first in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence from a colonial power in 1957, although Ethiopians would argue that they are the only African nation never to have been colonized, roughshod run of Italian fascists in WWII be damned. (Perhaps as a result, Ethiopians are known as a very proud people, as when they use a calendar that is seven years in the past, with a thirteenth month of five to six days every December.)
In any case, the person typically associated with leading Ghana’s independence is indeed on all the currency. Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister and philosophical champion of pan-Africanism - claims ubiquity, but not in isolation. You can read his accompaniment by the other “Big Six” of Ghana’s 1950s colonial resistance - Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, Edward Akufo Addo, William Ofori Atta, Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, and Joseph Kwame Danquah - in a few ways. With a certain amount of willful belief surrounding a grain of truth, you can see this as a metonymic affirmation of Nkrumah’s doctrine of pan-Africanism. These six men came from different regions and tribes of Ghana to band together and found a nation in an independent, African model. On the other hand, Nkrumah was probably the most instrumental of this group, for all of the continent as well as Ghana, but he’s relegated to a nostalgic group shot because his later years were primarily about instrumenting a strongman dictatorship. Chased out of the country for his misrule (with some dirty involvement by the CIA given his leftist connections), he actually died in exile from the country he helped to found. Since then, his remains have been repatriated into an ornate mausoleum in Accra, but the legacy is still mixed. Lake Volta, a sort of Ghanaian aquatic fingerprint (and the world’s largest artificial lake), is an output of his national dam project that would eventually supply hydroelectricity to the nation. It still does. Yet real per capita income plummeted during the first presidency, in part due to heavy foreign debt fees, but certainly accelerated by punitive taxation and unrealistic spending. It’s still low, maybe around $800 USD p.a. now. This was very salient to me when I went to the ATM and my 200 GHC request came in a huge stack of five-cedi bills. The larger bills simply don’t follow the pattern of common circulation. That all being said, I think the political legacy of nationalism-over-tribalism in Ghana has withstood a test of time that, say, Kenya’s hasn’t. There is no history of open civil conflict although there were totalitarian abuses, compared against neighboring West African states (Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin). Political power was transferred peacefully between executives after the last election, and despite its poverty Ghana has an inchoate welfare state that does an amazing job with limited resources to provide some measure of safety net to its citizens. Consider the National Health Insurance Scheme, implemented five years ago, which definitely has regional disparities and service gaps but which has achieved 60% national subscription and has gone a long way in addressing the tremendous burden of catastrophic health costs (imagine 1 in 100 of your population spending over 40% of their money on desperately needed medicines when not food) with relatively low budget. I’m probably biased both by prior beliefs as well as client project outcomes here, but I think lawful public goods provision is essential to peaceful market democracies, not the other way around (per Amartya Sen). I know they need to figure out how to sustain it, but it is striking to me how in my firsthand experience NHIS has ensured Ghanaian women a better standard of care for breast cancer than their counterparts in Kenya and roughly 3% better life expectancy overall, even though their households are apparently 10% poorer (USD or PPP).
Anyway, throw me off my health financing high horse. All of you have had vivid forex-swaps of your own. Did you notice anything about various currencies of the world and their subtle (or overt) remarks about the issuing polity?
{pt. I}
