Shells as currency

29-09-2021

Hi, this is Rehan. Welcome to this month’s update. I spent much of the month deep into completing the second edit of Legends of the Tasburai, which is the third novel in the Tasburai trilogy.

I actually finished the first draft back in 2017, but then got side-tracked into writing the three books in A Tudor Turk series. Anyway, it’s important to finish things we start, and it was with great pleasure that I spent the month reacquainting myself with the characters from Tasburai novels – including Suri-Yi, Adan, Ylva, Elsta and many others. It was like greeting old and dear friends, who you haven’t seen in a while. It was riveting and at times emotional, working through the material. I’m hoping to have this ready for you to read before the end of the year. More on that in future updates.

My publisher, HopeRoad, also surprised me by saying they are looking to get the covers for A Tudor Turk series, rejacketed for digital formats. This is great news and I’m eagerly awaiting to see what the new covers for A Tudor Turk, A King’s Armour and the upcoming A Demon’s Touch will look like.

This month I also visited the amazing students and teachers at GEMS New Millennium School in Dubai. They were so welcoming and made my trip one that I won’t forget. I spoke to the students about the importance of storytelling. They were a large and engaging group and thanks very much to the school for showing me tremendous hospitality and warmth in the way I was greeted and looked after. You can check out my Twitter feed @rehankhanauthor for some photos of the event.

As you know, I really enjoy reading history books, particularly when they provide me insightful ideas for new stories and characters. This month was no different and I digested with awe, Dr. Toby Green’s book on west Africa, called A Fistful of Shells.

Dr. Green says that in West Africa, history is an oral genre, held and recounted by professional historians known as praise-singers, or griots, whose patrons ask them to sing important histories at key public events and commemorations. He says that: “Oral accounts offer the experience of history, the importance of the past in present memory and a sense of what may have been socially meaningful in distant times. They also offer an incomparable window on to the way that history was performed, its sounds and textures, and what it meant for ordinary men and women”.

As we know Africa has a tremendously rich history before the European colonial empires turned up on the west African coast. When they did, the Europeans brought with them iron bars, cloths, cowries (or shells) and copper for trade, all of which were used as currency. This might seem a little odd to us now, but items like cloth were often used as currency back then. The Icelandic sagas refers to this and the historian Craig Muldrew has shown that many regions of England didn’t have much coin, and resorted to credit currencies to maintain their economies well into the seventeenth century.

So, whilst these “soft” currencies were flooding into Africa, “hard” currencies, such as gold were leaving the continent, and as we know gold retained its value, whereas cloth, copper, shells and other currencies which the European powers brought into Africa didn’t. This over generations led to wealth extraction from the continent.

Dr. Green also explains how the transatlantic slave trade kicked off by the colonial powers resulted in a further layer of inequality being introduced. The unfortunate men, women and children who were taken to the Americas as slaves, of which there are an estimated 12 million, but we’ll probably never know the precise figure, these individuals were free labour which created capital, for owners of plantations and European joint stock holding companies, such as the East India Trading Company.

In other words, the wealth which would have been created through the use of this African labour in Africa, was now exploited as free labour outside the continent.

It’s a sobering thought and certainly left me thinking about modern day wealth disparities, between the people who actually create value, such as farmers, artisans and crafts persons, and those who extract the value, often middlemen or in the parlance of today, technology platforms. The title of Dr. Toby Green’s book once more is A Fistful of Shells.

Anyway, I plan to be back with another update next month and in the meantime peace be upon you.