Manilla (money)
An important hoard had a group of 72 pieces with similar patination and soil crusting, suggesting common burial.
Some are fairly uniform in size and weight and served as monies of account like manillas, but others were actually worn as wealth display.
Some sources attribute their introduction to the ancient Phoenicians[7] who traded along the west coast of Africa or even early Carthaginian explorers and traders.
One theory is that if indigenous, they copied a splayed-end Raffia cloth bracelet worn by women, another that the Yoruba mondua with its bulbous ends inspired the manilla shape.
Early Portuguese traders thus found a preexisting and very convenient willingness to accept unlimited numbers of these 'bracelets', and they are referred to by Duarte Pacheco Pereira who made voyages in the 1490s to buy ivory tusks, slaves, and pepper.
Describing the exchange, with the Kingdom of Benin, in his, 1508, Esmeraldo de situ orbis: The houses are built of sun-dried bricks covered with palm leaves.
Earliest report on the use of Manillas in Africa points to its origin in Calabar the capital city of the Cross River State of coastal Southeastern Nigeria.
[6] They were also in use on the Benin river in 1589 and again in Calabar in 1688, where Dutch traders bought slaves against payment in rough grey copper armlets which had to be very well made or they would be quickly rejected.
A typical voyage took manillas and utilitarian brass objects such as pans and basins to Western Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves.
However, in the same book is a plaque with a European holding two pieces of very different form, crescent-shaped without flared ends, though apparently heavy if the proportions are correct.
Between 1504 and 1507, Portuguese traders imported 287,813 manillas from Portugal into Guinea via the trading station of São Jorge da Mina.
The Popos, whose weight distribution places them at the transition point between Nkobnkob and Onoudu, were made in Nantes, France, possibly Birmingham as well and were too small to be worn.
A class of heavier, more elongated pieces, probably produced in Africa, are often labelled by collectors as "King" or "Queen" manillas.
Plainer types were apparently bullion monies, but the fancier ones were owned by royalty and used as bride price and in a pre-funeral "dying ceremony."
[6] Although manillas were legal tender, they floated against British and French West African currencies and the palm-oil trading companies manipulated their value to advantage during the market season.
The manilla, a lingering reminder of the slave trade, ceased to be legal tender in British West Africa on April 1, 1949[4] after a six-month period of withdrawal.
As curios for the tourist trade and internal 'non-monetary' uses they are still made, often of more modern metals such as aluminium, but the designs are still largely traditional ones.
[2] Internally, manillas were the first true general-purpose currency known in West Africa, being used for ordinary market purchases, bride price, payment of fines, compensation of diviners, and for the needs of the next world, as burial money.
In regions outside coastal west Africa and the Niger River a variety of other currencies, such as bracelets of more complex native design, iron units often derived from tools, copper rods, themselves often bent into bracelets, and the well-known Handa (Katanga cross) all served as special-purpose monies.
