Symbolism, Self-representation and Adaptation: Coins as a Source for African History

This chapter focuses on coins as a source for studying African history.It adopts a long-term perspective to investigate how African political institutions and European colonial states have used specific images on coins to represent themselves. At the same time, it looks at how African currency users have engaged with these images and how such engagement has sometimes led to changes in currency design. The first section of the chapter analyses precolonial coins and their relevance for the study of African history. The second section provides examples of the coins issued during the colonial period and the images used by the colonial states to represent themselves. This section adopts a comparative perspective to highlight how colonial symbols on coins changed over time and what this can tell us, more broadly, about changing conditions in the colonies. The third section is devoted to the Italian colonies in East Africa, an area that has received little attention from the perspective of its monetary history yet is representative of the many failures of European colonial monetary policies. The last section examines the post-independence period and the symbols and names that African leaders chose to transform colonial money into African money.