Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story. Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla (translated by Thomas Fazi). Pluto Press. 2020.

The central topic of Africa's Last Colonial Currency is how France exerts control over several African countries through the CFA system, 'the oldest monetary union in the world'. With detailed discussions of the monetary mechanisms, Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla overwhelmingly demonstrate how this system, established in 1945, preserves a hierarchy wherein the benefits to France are 'underestimated' and the benefits to African countries are 'exaggerated'.

Much about monetary policy can be obscure, Pigeaud and Samba Sylla readily admit. Besides this, some of the central agencies have little motivation to simplify the matter for public debate. Indeed, the technical elements of monetary policy can be used to short-circuit discussions about the desirability of the CFA system. Still, the control of currencies can have enormous political-economic consequences because, depending on how this control is structured and exercised, it can be a cause of global inequality. This is certainly the case for the 162 million people living in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (comprising of Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo), the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (comprising of Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic and the Republic of the Congo) and the Comoros. These fifteen states comprise the franc zone, and they have France mediating their monetary policy.

This book has many audiences in mind including economic historians, postcolonial theorists and political scientists. It provides a political, diplomatic and technical history of the development of the CFA system, showing how currency arrangements are also conduits for wealth transfers from colonies to metropoles. It reviews how Africans struggled against this monetary system as well as the techniques the French state used to counter those attempts, like co-opting leaders and economic sabotage.

French monetary intervention in Africa has a long history. In 1825 King Charles X's regime minted coins for Goree, an island off Senegal and a site of the slave trade. Eventually the area of this currency was extended to counter British West African traders, often through military force to impose monetary transitions away from local indigenous currencies. In 1851, the French authorities established the Bank of Algeria, supervised by the Bank of France. Colonial banks like the Bank of Senegal were established in 1855 using funds derived from French state compensation paid to slave owners following abolition in 1848.

To read the complete article, see:
Book Review: Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla(https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2021/07/02/book-review-africas-last-colonial-currency-the-cfa-franc-story-by-fanny-pigeaud-and-ndongo-samba-sylla/)