In my last post, I compared Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to Monrovia, Liberia in that they are both cities that have suffered terribly from mismanagement and negle3ct in the last several decades, such that a visit to either feels like one has walked into a stage piece from 1978. Neither city has experienced much new construction in the last thirty years, and this is evident in everything from cracked pavement to broken streetlights, from faded paint to rusted steel.
However, there is another way in which Zimbabwe and Liberia compare, and this one is far more disconcerting for the average traveler - the use of the United States dollar as the main unit of domestic exchange.
If you've traveled often through any region of the world, you're probably used to operating a kind of internal forex everywhere you go. You may go to the ATM or use traveler's checks (do people still use traveler's checks? I honestly have no idea), but the end result is a proliferation of colorful new bank notes in various denominations, a plethora of new coins in different shapes and sizes, and a clean slate of personal knowledge on what costs how much where.
In West Africa, I had to remember that a dollar was equivalent to roughly 500 cfa, but that in Ghana, a dollar was roughly the same as one cedi. Okay, one hurdle jumped, but then there were the new prices and the old prices, a result of a World Bank sponsored revaluation exercise. A banana might cost 500 cedi, but that was the old price, before they cut off three zeros, so really that banana costs fifty cents. In Sierra Leone, that banana probably costs the same, only now it's 5000 Leones. If you're primarily traveling to Francophone West Africa, you'll be relatively fortunate that the cfa covers seven countries, but if you plan to leave any of the former French colonies, you'll still need to get used to the Ghanaian cedi, the Liberian dollar, the Leonean leone, and the Guinean franc, which is the same as the West African franc but with an extra zero for good measure.
To add to the mental gymnastics, one is constantly reminded that the West African monetary union drastically devalued the franc in the early 1990s, and yet the language of commerce just took it in stride and never bothered to readjust. Thus, a 1000 cfa note is often called 200, a fifty cent piece is known as a ten, and remembering the conversions and the vocabulary while negotiating over a pack of oranges can quickly become a frustrating but occasionally hilarious cultural exchange.
However, there is another way in which Zimbabwe and Liberia compare, and this one is far more disconcerting for the average traveler - the use of the United States dollar as the main unit of domestic exchange.
If you've traveled often through any region of the world, you're probably used to operating a kind of internal forex everywhere you go. You may go to the ATM or use traveler's checks (do people still use traveler's checks? I honestly have no idea), but the end result is a proliferation of colorful new bank notes in various denominations, a plethora of new coins in different shapes and sizes, and a clean slate of personal knowledge on what costs how much where.
In West Africa, I had to remember that a dollar was equivalent to roughly 500 cfa, but that in Ghana, a dollar was roughly the same as one cedi. Okay, one hurdle jumped, but then there were the new prices and the old prices, a result of a World Bank sponsored revaluation exercise. A banana might cost 500 cedi, but that was the old price, before they cut off three zeros, so really that banana costs fifty cents. In Sierra Leone, that banana probably costs the same, only now it's 5000 Leones. If you're primarily traveling to Francophone West Africa, you'll be relatively fortunate that the cfa covers seven countries, but if you plan to leave any of the former French colonies, you'll still need to get used to the Ghanaian cedi, the Liberian dollar, the Leonean leone, and the Guinean franc, which is the same as the West African franc but with an extra zero for good measure.
To add to the mental gymnastics, one is constantly reminded that the West African monetary union drastically devalued the franc in the early 1990s, and yet the language of commerce just took it in stride and never bothered to readjust. Thus, a 1000 cfa note is often called 200, a fifty cent piece is known as a ten, and remembering the conversions and the vocabulary while negotiating over a pack of oranges can quickly become a frustrating but occasionally hilarious cultural exchange.
It's a bit easier in Southern Africa. The South African rand has fallen to 10ZAR : 1USD. Lesotho's Maloti is tied to the rand. In Botswana, the pula is doing a bit better at 8BWP : 1USD, and in Zimbabwe, wel...
Zimbabwe, like Liberia, uses the US dollar in most day-to-day transactions. This makes sense for Liberia: the country was established as a new colony for freed American slaves in 1822 and gained its independence twenty-five years later. Its political end economic systems have always been linked to those of the United States. It has its own currency, the Liberian dollar, which is pegged to the US dollar at 75 LRD : 1 USD. The two are easily interchangeable, and, owing to their historic ties, the use of the US dollar doesn't seem strange at all.
Zimbabwe, on the other hand, uses a hodgepodge of US dollar, South African rand, and even Botswanan pula. Zimbabwe has no currency of its own, at least not lately.
Some who follow African politics may remember Zimbabwe's catastrophic inflation of the last decade. This wasn't the result of the global economic crisis, or of US/EU sanctions as some here claim, but neither of those helped matters much as inflation peaked at 231,000,000% in 2008. Zimbabwe's massive hyperinflation is the second worst in the history of the world. Daily inflation peaked at 98%, meaning that prices doubled every 24.7 hours. Prices soared. If one had to buy diesel for a car or generator, it was best to buy in the morning, prices could increase many times over by afternoon.
The crisis wiped out pensions, cleared bank accounts, and reduced the country to a barter system. One lodge owner told me that he allowed a friend of his to pay for his accommodation in cans of paint. In an attempt to control prices, the state ordered police into stores and businesses, froze prices for certain goods, and commanded shop owners to roll back prices to a previous date, effectively forcing business owners to halve their prices. The same lodge owner told me he kept multiple sets of accounts to appease the authorities while keeping his business running.
Maybe you've seen the Zimbabwean dollars from that time period. In 2009, Improbable Science awarded Gilbert Gono, the head of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, with the IG Nobel in Mathematics. The prize is given for dubious accomplishments that make you laugh, then think. Gono won for "giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers - from very small to very big - by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000.00). It's a feat that won't easily be matched for many years to come (or until Zimbabwe reintroduces the Zim dollar).
These dollars float around now as collectables, but if you look closely, you'll realize that they aren't collected for their design elements. With inflation rampaging out of control, these notes are often simply plain paper printed with a few numbers (many of them zeros) and a slapdash etching of a lake or a bird. At the nadir of economic collapse, the bank didn't even bother to print bills on both sides, and why would you? They were literally worth less than the paper on which they were printed.
For years, the black market in Zimbabwe used foreign currency and maintained its own floating exchange rate. Of course it was illegal, and the state railed against it while many of its highest placed officials profited from the economic chaos, using their influence to game the fixed rate versus that of the black market. Ultimately, however, hyperinflation forced the government to ditch the Zimbabwean dollar and welcome the US dollar as the new basis for the economy.
This leads to some pretty interesting exchanges in shops and on street corners.
"Two dollars, please."
Alright, here's a fiver.
"Oh, ah...do you have two dollars?"
Nope, only this and a twenty.
"Okayyy...I just need to find change. What coins do you have?"
Not enough, I have eight rand, five pula, and fifty thebe (about $1.45).
"That's fine. It's better to have change anyway. Thank you!"
This may seem like an odd interaction, but it's happened to me several times now. To make matters worse, many ATMs only spit out $100 bills. The first time I used one, it gave me five options: 100, 200, 400, 500, 1000. I thought to myself, "They can't surely mean..." They did. Your only options with many ATMs are clean, crisp, $100 bills.
It's then necessary to spend about two hours wandering around looking for change. The banks don't want to give their limited smaller bills away. Neither does Western Union. Street vendors just laugh when you ask if they can break a bill, and the various shops around town just send you down the street in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
If you ever can find some change, you're presented with a series of bills in a degree of usability that decreases with the denomination: crisp $100 bills, slightly ruffled fifties, still usable twenties, grimey tens, and fivers that are worn, dirty, and tattered.
And dollar bills? Well, alright, have you ever been to a smoker's house, and I mean a smoker who's smoked for the better part of six decades, not a stressed out master's student who is, at this point, surviving solely on coffee and cigarettes. I mean someone like, say, your great aunt. Okay, so you know how your great aunt has that couch that's been around for years and is probably stuffed with asbestos? It has to be stuffed with asbestos. There's literally no other way to explain the multitude of cigarette burns that have yet to burn the house down. Okay, so you're a kid, and your and has this couch, and it's dirty. Besides getting a contact buzz from the nicotine embedded in the fabric of the thing, it's never been cleaned, and your great aunt's seven cats have shed and yakked and and loved and lived and probably died all over this couch for fourteen years, each. And your great aunt has sat with her TV dinners and cigarettes watching Jeopardy since whatshisname hosted, that guy before Trebek. Merv Griffith. Ya, and you're a kid, and you're bored, and you're digging your hand in the cushions of the couch because you don't understand germ theory nor do you care about personal hygiene (a quality that some of us maintain long into adulthood). And there, between the metal frame of the pull-out bed that your cousin Gary had to sleep on for three years after his wife left him, is a snag of paper. And you pull, and squirm, and you finally manage to reclaim a dollar bill that was long ago lost to humanity. The thing is more brown than gree, it's been folded and handled so much that it feels like silk, and it smells like a sewer, but you don't care because that thing can buy you a coke and a candy bar (this is back in the day we're talking about after all). So you go out to the nearest gas station, and you hand that thing over to the wheezing, diabetic old woman watching the pumps like a hawk, like a sleepy, obese, rheumatoid hawk, and you walk out with a Dr. Pepper and a bag of Skittles to irritate the shit out of your parents with a sugar-induced game of hey, hey, hey, hey...hey, hey...pay attention to me, PAY ATTENTION TO ME.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
These are the only dollar bills that have ever made it to Zimbabwe.
It's not like the country has a direct line of credit to the US mint. These things get passed around and recirculated ad nauseum. New money must come into the system eventually, probably through traveling diplomats, businessmen, and criminals (sometimes all three embodied in the same individual). It is, after all, relatively easy to transport bills internationally. The same cannot be said of coins. Anything below a dollar is paid for in rand and pula from neighboring South Africa and Botswana.
They've set the exchange rate at 10 rand to the dollar, so it makes the math relatively easy, but there's little to prepare you for paying for a drink and getting your change in three different currencies.
I've even seen quite a few $2 bills here. Most Americans, I'm sure, aren't even aware that they still produce $2 bills. I have a few left over from when I was a kid, but using them in daily transactions is about as common as using the Sacajawea dollar coin. Can you even name who's on the $2 bill.
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| It's ahh...shit. It's Fillmore isn't it? Millard Fillmore? |
There's been some talk of reintroducing the Zimbabwean dollar, but after a senior politician (read: Mugabe) floated the idea at a recent political rally, the panic on the stock market forced the party come back and table it as a "long-term strategy."
So grab all the trillion dollar notes that you can. One day they may be worth something. For now though, you're probably better off drawing up your own money with a pack of crayons and some scrap paper. The resulting disaster may be valued by at least one person, which is more than can be said for the Zimbabwean dollar.
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