DOSSIER: REFRAMING AFRICAN MONETARY HISTORY: A SOUTHERN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

The articles presented in this dossier of the Southern Journal for Contemporary History result from a workshop held at the University of the Free State on 13 and 14 September 2022 themed “Money and Monetary Institutions in Africa”.1 The workshop aimed to bring together early career scholars in Africa with an interest in the monetary history of the continent. Three mentors — Lyla Latif, Tinashe Nyamunda, and Ayodeji Olukoju —gave feedback on the research papers presented and sparked a lively and thought-provoking two-day discussion.2 Our workshop also aimed to enrich the contemporary debates regarding money in Africa, moving the first steps towards an analytical framework for studying money in Africa developed by scholars based on the continent. The objective of the workshop was ambitious, as it placed itself in the tradition of studies originating from the seminal book edited by Jane E. Guyer, Money Matters, which laid new approaches for the study of money in Africa and its specificities, overcoming the narration of a “primitive” African monetary system that had been forcibly replaced with the introduction of “modern” money. Before Money Matters, the history of money in Africa was polarised around the debate among those embracing a formalist approach (extending the principles of neoclassical economics to African societies) and the advocates of a substantivist approach, according to whom the study of economic exchange in societies without “the market” required the development of different tools, closer to the cultural specificities of the societies to which they were applied.3