Money

There was a time in the DRC – then Zaire – when the black market in currency was thriving. It was much the same in other countries where I worked – Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia. Pretty soon after one arrived – whether for a long stay or a short one – someone would come up to you and suggest a deal. Sometimes it was shopkeepers, sometimes professional people, whatever their background, the message was the same: I’ll pay you a lot more for your US Dollars (or pounds) than you’ll get at the bank.

A colleague describes how in Kinshasa it was not the Lebanese shopkeepers, or the dodgy Belgian diamond merchants who were giving the best currency service – by which I mean the best rate and the cleanest deal. It was the church. So every morning a line would form outside the church offices next to the Catholic Cathedral of, not penitents, but expatriates with money to sell.

Those days are gone. Few countries now bother about exchange controls, and currency deals are openly advertised by street traders. In Africa, the dollar is, for some reason, always the preferred currency, and everyone seems to know the dollar exchange rate of the day.

The Congo has gone one step further. Because it has a shortage of bank notes, and because the biggest bank note, 500 Congolese francs, is worth only about 60 US cents, it is impractical to work in the Congolese franc. That’s not to say that no one does: you see people staggering out of the bank with ten kilos of bank notes, presumably to pay factory wages or something of the sort. At least the currency is stable – so it is different from the mad scramble of Zimbabwe’s currency crisis.

So the dollar is used for most transactions bigger than 10 or 20 dollars, but don’t assume that because you have dollar notes they will be accepted. They will be subjected to scrutiny far more intense than anything they might get in a US shop. If there is the tiniest tear they will be rejected. If they are more than a certain number of years old, they will be rejected. Any other defacement, like writing, is also treated with great suspicion. The note will be held up to the light to check for watermarks, silver threads and other guarantees of authenticity. Small dollar notes are very much frowned upon, and one dollar notes are usually returned with regret.

Change is normally given in francs. But here’s the interesting thing. Franc notes can be so crumpled, torn and plain filthy that there is hardly anything legible on them. Tears are cavalierly repaired with sellotape, and no one blinks an eyelid.

If you think about these notes it can be nauseating. There can be no question that they have spent many hours, no days, next to the human skin, as that is the safest place. And, as far as specific places on the body are concerned for men it is socks and for women it is in the bra. But there’s an even better place which lots of people use: right down there in their underwear.

The potential for this money to carry germs is enormous. It has long lost that starchy feel of newly minted notes. It is soft and very absorbent, spongy, almost.

But, there is another side to it. What stories would the money have if it could talk! Where in the country has it been: was it looted, were its users honest hard-working peasants, looting and ravaging brigands, industrialists, diamond miners or all of the above?

Having a dual currency requires more than a little ingenuity and mental arithmetic in shops and restaurants. Sometimes one has the feeling that it’s used as a smokescreen for pulling a fast one. But in the larger supermarkets they have tills which compute the amount due in dollars and francs simultaneously – quite fascinating. You offer payment in dollars, which is then converted into francs, and then a split amount of change is calculated, so that you get a few thousand francs, and a couple of dollar notes. There is so much room for confusion and mistakes here, notwithstanding the dual tills, that there is an army of supervisors hovering around the tills – just like in a casino – to check that no one is making a mistake.

Just as there are no large notes in francs, there are very few small ones, and no coins that I have seen. In effect there is a monopoly of the 500 franc notes, and if there aren’t enough small notes to make up the change you get it in sweets: one per 100 francs. I’m sure they don’t cost 100 francs each: they are more a token admission of debt.

A colleague spotted such a bowl of sweets by the till (not unusual in some shops in Europe as a trick to keep the children coming back) and was helping himself to a few when all hell broke loose. It took him a long time to understand what he had done wrong.