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ABSTRACT
This essay analyses the emergence and importance of multiple non-fungible kinds of US Dollars in the context of Zimbabwe’s multi-currency era (2009–2019). It does so to accomplish two related tasks. First, building on Bohannan’s classic distinction between conveyances and conversions, it highlights the dissolution and reconstitution of state money in Zimbabwe between 2007 and 2019 as characteristic of a ‘reconversioning’ of economic life. By the latter, I denote the irruption of incommensurabilities between different kinds of pecuniary media and the return of time- and place-specific thresholds or barriers to the smooth functioning of commerce. Second it unpacks the significant implications that this reconversioning has for received understandings of money’s fungibility. Ultimately, it argues that received notions of money's (non-)fungibility that derive from modern ‘states-of-conveyance’ need to be supplemented with models that are capable of reckoning with ‘conversionary’ monetary environments.
Acknowledgements
This paper is a heavily modified version of an essay originally prepared for a panel on Currency Politics at the American Anthropological Association's 2019 annual meetings in Vancouver, BC. I am grateful for the comments received there from Daromir Rudnyckyj, Allison Truitt, Bill Maurer, Sarah Muir and Douglas Holmes. A special word of thanks to Jeremy Jones for his astute readings of previous drafts and advice on all things Zimbabwe. I would also like to express my thanks to the journal's editorial board and to the anonymous reviewers who offered extremely acute and helpful suggestions that have significantly strengthened this paper. The responsibility for any remaining errors is mine alone. Finally, my greatest thanks go to my Zimbabwean friends and interlocutors who must remain unnamed but without whom this paper would not exist.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Given government displeasure with such pricing practices, the different prices for different means of payment were increasingly given verbally rather than displayed in print.
2 In terms of the discussion that follows, ‘cash’ here clearly refers to bond notes (as no one would spend actual USD cash on cheap items of clothing), ‘coins’ are bond coin, ‘swipe’ refers to card payments made through the bank-run Zimswitch network, and ‘Eco Cash’ [sic] is the mobile money product of privately held telco EcoNet. All of these are discussed in considerable detail below. Kwenga is a low-cost POS payment system set up by EcoNet-owned Steward Bank as an alternative payment system to swipe. In my experience it was not particularly popular.
3 For lack of a better vocabulary. Here we can take global north as roughly equivalent to the domain of uniform state-issued money even if this is not entirely the case within its (meta-geographical) borders. It is also quite true as one of JCE’s anonymous readers emphasized that the reach of such conveyance-ing money is not universal even within these confines.
5 My thanks to one of the journal’s anonymous readers who suggested, acutely, that is also true for some communities within the Global North: e.g., those without bank accounts, for those who cannot afford to bank, for those who live on payday loans, for those who resort to barter as part of their realm of fungibility.
6 The terms conversion and conveyance are from Bohannan’s classic work (Citation1959) on spheres of exchange among the Tiv people of Nigeria. Briefly, conversions are symbolically-charged transactions between hierarchically-organized and, per Guyer (Citation2004), spatially-located economic realms whereas conveyances are neither placed nor freighted with symbolic charge and occur within rather than between particular spheres of exchange.
7 Technically, the Zimbabwean dollar circulated until its demonetization in 2015, but after 2009 its importance to economic life was minimal.
8 ‘Ramshackle dollarization’ is Jeremy Jones’ (personal communication) phrase.
9 Utopian for Dodd arguably refers more to money’s potential to contribute to and/or be reconfigured in schemes to ameliorate the failings of contemporary human societies than it does to placelessness, but the two resonances are difficult to untangle
10 Similarly, see Cattelino Citation2009, 196 (my emphasis): ‘Dividends are not “special-use” money, in the sense of being exchangeable only in certain contexts or for specific objects (cf. Bohannon Citation1959). Rather, they represent fungible money that, I suggest, can be thought of as ‘special people’ money, restricted by the political boundaries of a community (i.e., available directly only to Seminole citizens) and understood to represent Seminole power).’
11 Transitions from ‘synthetic-qualitative’ to ‘abstract-quantitative’ modes of engaging with the world may be traced across domains including measurement (Curtis Citation1998; Kula Citation1986; Alder Citation1995), number (Wise Citation1995; Thomas Citation1987; Porter Citation1995), and money (Tschoegl Citation2010; Helleiner Citation2003).
13 Note that Ofonagoro uses the term extraversion rather differently to Bayart’s more familiar formulation (Bayart and Ellis Citation2000). For the former it is more narrowly focused on the structure of economic systems whereas the latter treats it as a form of Foucauldian subjectification. Thanks to Jeremy Jones (personal communication) for raising this point.
14 In Southern Rhodesia (Rhodesia alone after 1963), this monetization of indigenous exchange was supplemented by an explicitly white supremacist policy of land allocation which pushed black Africans off the best farmland into reserves characterized by poor soil. Land and economic policy worked together to prop up the ruling white minority.
15 Given this importance, the looting of more than 100,000 cattle by early white settlers and the Rinderpest epidemic later in the 1890s were massive disruptions to traditional socio-economic practice.
16 This currency was itself quite variegated: Feingold, Fourie, and Gardner (Citation2021, 265) note that ‘much like West Africa and despite its earlier colonization, South Africa also went through a slow and halting progression from a system of multiple currencies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to, eventually, one with a unified national currency in the twentieth.’
18 https://www.theanchor.co.zw/money-and-economy-in-zimbabwean-history-a-concise-currency-timeline-3/
20 https://www.theanchor.co.zw/money-and-economy-in-zimbabwean-history-a-concise-currency-timeline-10/
21 https://hsf.org.za/publications/focus/issue-30-second-quarter-2003/origins-of-the-zimbabwe-crisis
22 On the contrast between patriotic and cosmopolitan currencies see Helleiner Citation1998.
23 The vast majority of Zimbabweans work in the informal sector and remain unbanked.
24 Originally the name of a payment infrastructure, this acronym later came to denote both a specific currency with both cash and plastic elements (the RTGS dollar) that was created in February 2019 as a precursor to reintroducing the Zimbabwean dollar later that year and, confusingly, a catchall term for all electronic money that could not be proven to derive from actual USD cash. See Gukurume Citation2015 on RTGS during the hyperinflation era.
25 RTGS was eventually rendered officially nonfungible with the USD, plastic, in Nostro FCAs by reforms to the system in early 2019.
26 On mobile money see Maurer Citation2012a and Citation2012b and Rea and Nelms Citation2017
27 Named after Minister for Finance and Economic Development Mthuli Ncube.
29 As of 2022, Nostro FCAs were subjected to a differential regime of accessibility and usability based on where the funds in the account are deemed to have originated. While Nostro funds that stem from cash deposits are, in theory, easier to withdraw, Nostro funds that originated in export proceeds or in transfers from other Nostro accounts both are more difficult to withdraw and must be used within 30 days lest they be converted into RTGS at the prevailing market rate. (see https://zimpricecheck.com/price-updates/bank-charges-and-card-fees/nostro-accounts-requirements-and-conditions/). USD cash bears no such risk.
31 One notes the strong suspicion on the part of many Zimbabweans that the government itself is one of the key players in the black-market USD trade. See Mawowa and Matonga Citation2010.
33 A cashier at a tourist-oriented restaurant in Victoria Falls, laughing at my attempts to count out coins to pay for my dinner told me of the time a customer had paid in coin for seven brisket sandwiches. The bill came to $256 bond. It took him as long to count the money as it did for the sandwiches to be made.
34 Beginning in February 2019, with the debut of the RTGS dollar, RTGS also came to constitute, however temporarily, an alternate unit of account to the USD.
35 In June 2019 when the RTGS dollar morphed into the new Zim dollar and, at least officially, also replaced the dollar as the standard of deferred payment (See Vasantkumar Citation2022 for a detailed treatment of this transition).
39 There are a host of sources on similar sorts of monetary diversity in the west – not mental earmarking of amounts of otherwise standardized currency but monetary ecologies featuring a diversity of actual notes and coins, etc. See for example, White (Citation2014) or Mihm (Citation2009).
40 I thank Jeremy Jones for helping me to work through this phrasing.
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