The shock of the old: How a local currency’s transition from digital to paper deepened monetary conscientization

“Now that it doesn’t come from the phone, where is the money coming from?” asks a member of Wazee Hukumbuka during one of the farmers’ cooperative’s community meetings. Silas, a local leader knowledgeable about community currencies, answers swiftly. “As Wazee Hukumbuka, you are paying members for their seeds from a sort of cooperative fund. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s just that you are not aware of it”. Soon after, members excitedly discuss activities and goods to include in the rules governing the creation of their local money: waste collection and up-cycling into fertiliser, a member’s honey production, the work of ploughing and weeding the land. They have become aware that how their local currency is issued shapes the social, political and material space in which they live. Building on empirical material produced through individual and group interviews as well as ethnographic participation, this article analyses the process of monetary learning ignited by the transition from digital to paper of a community currency in Aboke, a rural area in Kenya. Inspired by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the article develops the concept of “monetary conscientization” as the process that expands the agency of users of money. In Aboke, monetary conscientization was brought about through the transparency of old technologies, which showed users of money how to relate to money politically as issuers of money.