Throughout history, many different objects have been used to facilitate trade for goods and to measure wealth. Today, we usually think of dollars and coins when we define what we regard as money, although much commerce is carried out without any physical currency at all. Value is counted by entries in bank and credit card accounts, and the transfer of money often takes place through electronic impulses between computers. Objects have served the same purposes as well, in other times and places.

Throughout Africa's past, many objects have served as money—salt, shells, beads, metal, indigenous coins, European coins, jewelry, woven cloth, weapons and tools. The keys to understanding why a particular object came to be used as currency are acceptability and value. Acceptability encompasses such aspects as familiarity, usefulness and artistic expression, which add to the intrinsic value of the medium itself. Thus, while the scarcity of copper might have caused it to be exchanged on that basis alone, its use was further validated through the forms into which it was cast. Iron was more ubiquitous in African societies, but refining, forging, forming and decorating similarly increased its value.

Economists and financial historians writing about mediums of exchange typically define currency as a durable, divisible and accepted means of measuring and storing value. Governments and laws largely define acceptance today, but over the course of history, acceptance was more often conferred by broader cultural currents, including religion, myth and beliefs about the nature of the universe. In Africa, where few extensive nation-states existed, the needs of trade and commerce depended on commonly held beliefs or values that spanned great geographical distances and an almost unimaginable diversity of activities. Consequently, the currency needed for even the simplest daily transactions was backed by shared beliefs as much as by the intrinsic value of the currency itself. Transactions that involved significant life events—marriage, procreation, health and death—were validated by objects with high intrinsic, symbolic and artistic values.

This exhibition is a celebration of the art of the currencies used in Africa. It also explores the beliefs that supported the monetary systems of African societies and led to the elaboration and transformation of plain currencies into objects of beauty.

To provide a context for these currencies, this exhibition includes a selection of objects commonly used as mediums of exchange, such as cowrie shells, beads and bundled and woven textiles. The metal currencies, which are the focus of this exhibit, range from conventional forms to highly valued complex designs executed with considerable technical skill and artistic sensibility in rare and precious metals.

[Text and images courtesy Smithsonian National Museum of African Art]



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A young man watching a dance, a group of people waiting for a train, a woman hanging laundry out to dry—such are the ordinary events captured in Constance Stuart Larrabee's extraordinary images in Southern Africa, 1936-1949: Photographs by Constance Stuart Larrabee. The exhibition features 79 black-and-white photographs that depict activities of daily life, ceremonies, and political events during a tumultuous period in the history of South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana.

Born in England in 1914, Larrabee studied photography in London and in Munich, where she learned the basic tenets of her modernist style, such as dramatic contrasts, sharp lines, lush textures, and expressive silhouettes. In 1936 she opened the Constance Stuart Portrait Studio in Pretoria, South Africa, and in 1944, during World War II, she became South Africa's first female war correspondent in Europe. She returned to South Africa in 1945, where she continued to work until moving to the United States in 1949.

Southern Africa is divided into three sections, the first of which, "Observing Life in the Countryside," includes several portraits of people from various groups, such as the Ndebele, Sotho, Lovedu, and San. This section also presents a selection of images of the Nagmaal (Holy Communion), a quarterly religious and social gathering of rural Afrikaners.

"Witnessing History in Southern Africa" includes a 1948 photograph of Prime Minister Daniel François Malan (1874-1959), who implemented Apartheid, the system of racial segregation and exploitation that remained legally intact until 1994. This section also presents a portfolio of images inspired by Alan Paton's novel Cry the Beloved Country (1948), which described the harsh lives of those suffering under segregation.

"Depicting Life in the City and Mines" features scenes from Johannesburg and townships near Johannesburg, Kimberley, and Cape Town. In addition to photographs of miners in their spartan quarters, other images show the victims of segregation proceeding with their lives as best they can: worshiping, reading, washing clothes, or dancing at a community center.

The photographs in Southern Africa, 1936-1949, are drawn from a large collection of negatives and prints given to the National Museum of African Art by Constance Stuart Larrabee in 1997. The exhibition features modern silver gelatin prints made from the original negatives. The curator is Christraud M. Geary, head of the museum's Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives.

[Text and images courtesy Smithsonian National Museum of African Art]

LSEM Press Release

Visit the Smithsonian for an on-line preview.