This situation owes nothing to chance. It is even, to some extent, engineered. Since the colonial period, every effort has been made to ensure that the users of the CFA franc know as little as possible about the device hidden behind these three enigmatic letters. It is precisely this invisibility, or more precisely this smokescreen, that Yapsy's underwater rope illustrates so well. The reason for this concealment is easy to understand: the mechanism underlying the CFA franc is simply devious.

Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa's Last Colonial Curr…, loc. 43