So why is is that Senegal decided they
needed a second form of currency? Or more specifically I believe
this currency is an outdated monetary form that Senegal has refused
to get rid of. Maybe before globalization, the rush towards
development, and imposing capitalist markets this worked ok, but now
I can't help but to see their second currency as only a hindrance.
Livestock. As far as I can tell, when
a Senegalese person looks at a cow, or a goat, or a chicken they do
not see meat, or work animals, or pets. They see money. The amount
of money ranges depending on the health and size of the animal. It
would also depend on your bargaining skills and the wealth of the
person buying the animal, but let's say for example that a chicken is
3,000cfa, a goat is 15,000cfa, and a cow is 50,000cfa. That's what
they see instead of four legs, a wet nose, a long tail, huge horns,
and glassy eyes. It might at first seem like an acceptable form of
currency, especially since all of Senegal seems to think this way.
If you were to buy a chicken for 3,000cfa, you could reasonably
imagine getting another 3,000cfa if you then sold it. There's even
the advantage of being able to buy a baby goat for say 5,000cfa and
later selling it for 15,000cfa once it's grown. Like the stalk
market, a good investment you expect to increase in value. People do
this instead of opening bank accounts. A mother will buy her
daughter a baby goat to take with her when she gets married in case
times get tough and she needs to sell it. Little kids will raise
chickens because they're certainly not going to get an allowance.
You only need to look at a man's heard of cows to know how wealthy he
is. This isn't money you can touch now, it's a savings account for
whatever comes up in the future.
This might seem like an intelligent and
responsible way to save and even make a little money. Especially
with the social pressure that comes with actually having spending
money in a society like Senegal's. Except of course, one tiny little
detail. Animals die. Maybe two little details: many Senegalese
people do not get enough nutrients. People are so desperate to save
money that they've taken livestock numbers beyond useful amounts.
Usually when supply increases, all other things equal, the price goes
down. In this case price cannot go down because it's a currency and
people are overly faithful that a cow has a set price. The
alternative, that they realize they have way more cows than they have
demand for, would effectively cause their currency to lose value and
create inflation. Not a great option either. But by not realizing
that their cows are worth much less than they believe, there are
people who are malnourished. You cannot eat a cow because then you'd
be spending 50,000cfa, way more than you can afford to spend on meat,
so you go without, keeping your money and your protein deficient
meal. You go without, go without, go without, and then hot season
comes, your cow doesn't get much food or water, and dies. Now you've
lost your money and are still malnourished. This seems ridiculous,
and you might think I'm exaggerating, surely they must understand and
eat their meat before it dies, but this is not the case.
Whenever my parents call they laugh at
the roosters crowing in the background. I could not plant a
vegetable garden in my back yard because whenever I put seeds in the
ground, a few hours later they'd be eaten by chickens. I used to
take bucket baths in front of an audience of 4 chickens that roosted
on my fence. I have never lived around so much poultry. But the
number of times I have eaten chicken in village in my two years here:
twice. Once the women killed a chicken, cooked it, waited until the
children went to bed, and ate it. Another time I had a friend visit
on her birthday and I gave money to kill two chickens for our lunch,
and my host father biked two villages over to find someone willing to
sell two of their chickens. Everyone else wanted to keep their
“account” and refused the money. We don't eat eggs either. The
only time I've eaten eggs in village was when I found 6 behind my
room and cooked them myself. They all want their chickens to lay
eggs that will then grow into more chickens, birthing savings
accounts. A whole new meaning to nest egg (or possibly the original
meaning). This might make sense, if we ever sold or ate a chicken.
Instead they just die. Dogs eat them, they get old, they get
diseases. I've seen my host grandmother carrying dead chickens out
from her back yard, where they went to die from some disease. We've
killed a few more goats and sheep than we have chickens. But of
course our most expensive sheep, a ram my mother invested in and
fattened up, which she was going to sell at Tabaski, using the
profits to send her daughter to high school, was taken from her by my
host father. He didn't have money for a ram, hadn't had the
foresight to buy a small one when they were cheap before the holiday,
but didn't want the shame of not eating one on Tabaski. So instead
he took my host mothers and killed that for free. She of course was
still responsible for finding money to send her daughter to school,
which she came to me for, but ended up losing money on her livestock
investment. He has yet to pay her back, almost a year later, even
though he's found money to spend lots of time in Tamba and buy
multiple cell phones. In this case there's not much my host mother
could have done, culturally acceptable gender inequality means he'll
probably never pay her back, stealing is a whole other issue. But
imagine she had cash instead of a sheep. Maybe she could have hidden
it. Maybe she could have had a secret bank account with a pin number
he didn't know. Some women's groups have programs where they all
give a small amount each week and wait for a large sum to divide it
back up or rotate who gets the pot each meeting. Maybe he would have
taken only a portion of her money. But with her sheep he saw it and
wanted it and killed it, done.
I try hard not to judge what I see here
in Senegal, it's not my culture and I can never fully understand it,
but this seems to be a glaring problem with Senegalese village
economics. As a former vegetarian, I am emphatically yelling: Eat
more meat S
