During the pre-colonial period, different types of currencies circulated on the African continent. Rubber balls, iron and copper bars, shells, zinc fragments, cotton wool, brass wires, glass beads and porcelain grains were just a few of the materials used as means of transaction. Money was certainly a medium of exchange and payment but it was, above all, an institution that helped reconfigure social relations. For this reason, it was entrusted 'to the elderly, to the village leaders, who were responsible for protecting the binds between the community and its founders'. The cowries, a shell found in the Indian Ocean, called timekla by the Tuareg and oudà in Timbuktu, and particularly widespread among the Yoruba, a people of Nigeria, was long used in West Africa, which in fact was known as the 'cowrie zone'. It was at the centre of the construction of powerful pan-African trade networks, particularly in the western Volta region, located in present-day Burkina Faso, and in Sudan in present-day Mali. In the first half of the eighteenth century, cowries even had an official exchange rate vis-à-vis the livre tournois, the prevailing unit of account in France from the Middle Ages until 1795, when the franc became the only currency in the country. In 1724, 1,000 cowries were worth 960 deniers tournois, a sub-multiple of the livre tournois.

Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa's Last Colonial Curr…, loc. 53