FOR thousands of years pre-historic man needed no money; everything he needed was provided freely from nature.
The need for money gradually developed out of various needs of early societies such as ceremonies and feasts, compensation for murder and as a bride price (lobola/roora).
Chronologically, from the dawn of civilisation onwards, and geographically from China, to east and western Europe, Russia, Asia and the new world, the fungibility of money is essentially a medium of exchange that functions as legal tender.
It is essentially the official currency issued by a nation’s government or other monetary authority; produced in the form of banknotes, coins, in particular denominations to facilitate trade.
Money in the form of gold and silver objects were used to pay tribute to the kings in Babylon and the pharaohs in Egypt and religious activities as gifts and sacrifices to the priests, priestesses and their various gods.
Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt have made major contributions to the development of banking, and China’s better known contribution to financial history is the invention of paper money and the development of coinage.
In many parts of ancient Africa from the 15th Century and over much of southern Asia in the 17th Century, cowrie shells were used as a form of monetary exchange.
In North America, the First-Nation inhabitants made use of ‘wampum’ shells, similar to the ‘ndoro chena’ and the custom of the ‘potlatch’ or competitive ‘gift exchange’ as barter trade.
Similarly, ocean whales’ teeth were used in Fiji, in the south-west Pacific, and disc-shaped stones in Yap (islands in the Western Pacific).
However, these primitive forms of money exchange were also subject to some of the same problems faced today, such as the drastic depreciation in the value of the cowrie shells in Uganda following the wholesale importation of such shells in the mid-19th Century, and a similar fall in value of wampum in America following the introduction in 1760 of mechanised drilling and factory assembly of wampum in New Jersey.
The money cowrie was made from the shell of any tropical marine mollusc gastropod mostly of the tropical family cypraeidae; especially the shell of cypraea Moneta.
The word kauri is Hindi from Sanskrit Kaparda of Dravidian origin.
In ancient Zimbabwe, cowrie shells were not used exclusively as money as in other parts of Africa, but were used as highly prized ornaments and magical objects.
Prior to colonisation in the late 19th Century, the economy at Great Zimbabwe had not developed sufficiently to warrant a formal institutionalised money system.
All trading was conducted by barter, the simple exchange of one commodity for another.
Cattle, sheep, goats and hoes were the recognised currency for lobola (bride price), while foreign trade with the Arabs and Portuguese introduced a wide range of trade goods; cloth, porcelain, beads, firearms, which were exchanged for gold and ivory.
Certain goods exchanged being in general demand however, had reached the status of ‘commodity currency’, and had assumed generally accepted and established values, despite being commodities primarily used for consumption.
Cattle, which have been described as mankind’s ‘first working capital asset’; were the main form of monetary exchange in the pre-colonial era among the traditional Shona and many other African groups.
They represented the main wealth and played a vital role in rites of passage, payment for brides’ lobola, and other ceremonial occasions.
Cattle were also used as payment for the breach of custom or breach of moral taboos such as incest, where the slaughtering of animals of a prescribed sex or colour was used in rituals to propitiate the ancestors.
Africa’s attachment to cattle as a store of wealth, however, had deleterious environmental consequences, owing to the vagaries of the weather, making the development of monetary systems and institutions that satisfy the needs of the rural population even more important.
Linguistic evidence indicates that in ancient times cattle were similarly valued by European nations; the English words ‘capital’, ‘chattels’ and ‘cattle’ have a common root. Similarly, the word ‘pecuniary’ derives from the Latin word for cattle ‘pecus’.
Money/monies according to the dictionary is: a medium of exchange that functions as legal tender, property or assets with reference to its realisable value.
According to the same dictionary, realisable is: to make concrete or actual – to actualise; to convert property or goods into cash;
Value: the desirability of a thing, often in respect of some property such as usefulness, exchangeability, worth, merit or importance.
Or value is: an amount, especially a material or monetary one, considered being a fair exchange in return for a thing assigned (given) equal value.
But the history of money is one of constant conflict between the interests of debtors, who seek to broaden the quantity of money and who enthusiastically seek to discover suitable alternatives, and the interests of creditors, who try to maintain or increase the value of money by limiting its supply.
The monetary pendulum is rarely motionless at a point of ideal balance between the conflicting interests of creditors and debtors.
Money is rarely unbiased in its effects upon the real economy and upon the fortunes of different sections of the community; it gives no precedence to posterity or the poor.
The invention of money has many origins. As an institution, money is infinitely adaptable; because it can perform many functions in comparable ways and similar functions in many ways.
Money is so useful; it performs so many functions, that it invariably attracts alternatives; the narrower its confining lines are drawn, the higher the premium there is on developing passable substitutes.
Officially, Zimbabwe uses a currency basket which includes the Botswana pula, British pound, the euro, South African rand and the US dollar; rupee, yen and yuan, as its monetary options.
In the normal course of events, money is hardly ever inert or nonaligned while the safe haven of equilibrium is equally rarely attained.
Given the current issue of the new Bond notes, one wondered as to why we have not given our currency an indigenous identification.
Zimbabwean monetary exchange has gone through various transitions and mutations concurrently with the various socio-political changes witnessed from colonisation to the present.
Traditional names for money and methods of monetary exchange in Zimbabwe have been numerous; from makwati to zhunde (a portion of the king’s share), to ndarama – the red copper.
Even Zimbabwean urban Shona slang has had its fair input to the nomenclature of money from shagi, to ndhayi, mapaweni, mazuma, etc.
Zimbabwe inherited the name ‘dollars’ from the Rhodesian dollar, which was exchanged for the (British) pound and shillings used during the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland era of 1956 – 1963, after the UDI declaration, in the early 1970s.
However, the dollar is principally an American term.
Our parents referred to pounds, crowns and shillings as: “ma pondo, ma coroni nema shiringi”.
Third World’s money and debt in the 20th Century enabled millions of the world’s poorest men and women to earn a decent living for themselves, one the greatest problems facing mankind today.
Countries that are today wealthy once faced problems that were similar in certain respects to those of developing countries today.
Parts of the world which today are regarded as Third World, or developing countries, such as Africa, and Zimbabwe in particular, were once centres of great wealth and civilisations; wealthier even than those countries considered wealthy today.
Their wealth is mainly due to their exploitation and plundering of the natural resources, including land in Africa, and the gold and silver of Central and South America.
Over the centuries, money has come to reflect changes in socio-economic life in people, families, neighbourhoods and countries; in power, politics, science and technologies.
Money has reflected changes in religious and other cultural beliefs and other aspects of our existence.
Can developing countries achieve high economic growth without reasonably sound sovereign currencies?
Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) and Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. He is a writer, lecturer, musician, art critic, practising artist and corporate image consultant. He is also a specialist art consultant, post-colonial scholar, Zimbabwean socio-economic analyst and researcher.
E-mail: tonym.MONDA@gmail.com