Africa and Oceania
Money and Ethnography
Already in the 1920s the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was criticizing
'primitivist' conceptions of indigenous societies and their economics: 'Another
error more or less explicitly expressed in all writings on primitive economics, is
that the natives possess only rudimentary forms of trade and exchange.' Since
then the work of anthropologists has continued to explore local payment and
exchange systems and the societies within which they operate, and now they
can be seen as anything but rudimentary. Most. importantly, it is now recognized
that tribal societies have integral forms of social development in their own right,
and that we should not assume that Western concepts of money also underlie
apparently analogous phenomena in other parts of the world. Thus it would be
wrong to assume that salt, money or feather money were used in the same ways
and for the same reasons that the Western tradition has tended to use coins
and paper money. One of the main differences between tribal and Western
systems is the extent to which commercial considerations determine the reasons for
making payments of various sorts. By no means all societies are so centred on
trade and exchange as are those of the West. Indeed, it is arguable that Western
culture and its money systems, far from being 'normal', are actually an
historical anomaly in their fixation on the commercial. If this is right, it would be an
even greater mistake for Westerners to interpret other monetary systems as a more primitive version of their own.
From 1949 to 1953 the British anthropologist Mary Douglas spent time living among the Lele people
in the Kasia District of Belgian Congo (now Zaire), and in 1958 she published an
account of their use of cloth money in a country dominated by the coin-using Belgian colonial authorities.
Cloth money had a long history in the Congo. Its use was mentioned in the seventeenth century by
Jean Barbot, a French government agent in Africa. In the twentieth century Mary Douglas observed
that the cloth was woven from raffia by Lele men, who could weave about two or three cloths in a
day. They were sewn together when worn or used in payments, often in multiples of ten. Barbot's
account from more than 350 years earlier contains similar details.
By the time of Douglas's visit the Lele were familiar with a currency based on coins and paper
money, denominated in Belgian Congo francs and centimes. They were also expected to pay their
taxes and fines to the Native Tribunal in this currency. In reality they often made payments to the
tribunal in cloth at an official exchange rate of 10 francs per cloth. The Lele also had contact with
European money and coins through the wages of their young men who worked for colonial
employers. Within the Lele community, however, the colonial francs did not have a direct role except
when acting as a substitute for payments in cloth, and then their value had to be translated into cloths
in order to be usable.
In high-value 'payments' within their community the Lele often used camwood (a wood used
to make pigment), salt, copper bars, goats and, before the 1930s, slaves, but they were all still
valued in terms of cloths. This was a traditional practice in the region, described three hundred years
previously by the Dutch writer Olfert Dapper, who mentioned slaves and camwood being used
in the kingdom of Kongo alongside 'little pieces of cloth and such bagatelles, which they esteem as
much in their country as gold and silver in Europe'. Among the Lele, Douglas observed that
the functions of cloths and camwood in the Congo were not the same as those of European
money. The Lele did not have a market-based economy, for, according to Douglas: 'goods are
distributed mostly on the basis of status, and not
by purchase'. They only exceptionally exchanged goods by barter or by
exchange, whether for cloths or francs, and then normally only for
high value goods and with other communities. The only sales for cloth within the
Lele community that she observed were for the work of carvers and other
skilled craftsmen, but these exchanges were only possible provided the buyer had no kinship ties with the seller.
The Lele valued cloth in the same way as the Europeans valued gold and
silver, but because Lele society was very different, payments in cloth were made
in response to a very different set of circumstances which were, for the most
part, not commercial but social in character. Moreover, when coins and paper
money began to penetrate Lele society, they were used in the same way as cloth
money within the community, and were only exchanged commercially in
dealings with the colonial administration. Thus the Lele attempted to preserve the
integrity of their own 'money' system in the face of social changes caused by colonial domination.
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