OLD AGE AND MONEY: THE GENERAL NUMISMATICS OF KENYA

Authors

• Robert Blunt Lafayette College

Keywords:

money, numismatics, gerontocracy, Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta

Abstract

This research report examines the relationship between promissory acts and promissory notes in Kenyan history and its popular imagination. In Jomo Kenyatta’s classic ethnography of the Kikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya, he decries the corrosive power of money to corrupt the ritual techniques used to guarantee the honesty of elders in customary legal tribunals. However, at the advent of monetary independence from the East African shilling in 1966, Kenyatta seemed to have undergone something of a modification in his monetary thinking. Kenya’s new currency was emblazoned with Kenyatta’s own image as if to suggest that he himself backed its stability and capacity to ensure social reproduction. If we are to take seriously Keith Hart’s observation that money always has two sides, heads and tails, representing both the authority of the state and a commodity with a price, what might the iconography of Kenya’s new money tell us about Kenyan notions of trust and value that were grafted onto the nation-state form in 1966? This paper argues that Kenyatta’s money attempted to suture gerontocratic authority to the quantitative value of the money form. In this respect, Kenyatta established a political tradition in which leaders attempted to embody the logic of the general equivalent itself.