Last week I shared the brief history of the circulation and use of a currency created by a missionary Bible school teacher at Bafuka.  I called it the Z-bill because Bob Zimmerman designed and printed the purple paper money to use in that remote part of Zaire while awaiting the distribution of the new currency as ordered by Mobutu.

It wasn’t really counterfeit money because the creator did not copy an existing currency for his personal profit to take advantage of an ignorant people.  There was no money to copy.  He did, however, meet an urgent need by supplying a method for the people in that remote area to buy, sell, and settle debts among themselves.

The new Zaire bill was declared to have the same value as two US dollars.  The largest Zaire bills were the blue 10 Zaire and the green 5 Zaire notes.  A Zaire was divided into 100 Makutas.  There were 20, 10, 5 and 1 Makuta coins.  The Makuta coin was divided into 100 Sengis the smallest being the tiny aluminum 10 Sengi piece.  One egg from the market cost 10 Sengies.  The new money was in circulation.

Though we had no local bank at Rethy, obtaining the new Zaires was relatively easy.  The Field Treasurer lived at Rethy and kept accounts for all the AIM missionaries in Zaire.  He had contacts to purchase Zaires with dollars so, with his help we simply requested Zaires and received them in an envelope.  The deduction against our personal account was made at the current exchange rate.

We had no interest in the exchange rate at first since we did very little buying or selling with our teaching and dorm parenting responsibilities.  We took our meals at the dorm and we lived in the dorm with our 23 children.

It didn’t take long for prices to increase; the price of an egg got up to one then one and one half Makutas.  Had the eggs grown in size?  What was happening?  The Zaires we bought through the Field Treasurer cost less than they ever had before. 

It wasn’t long before the 10 Sengi coin disappeared.  Nobody wanted money that could buy nothing.  The idea of an exchange rate somehow changing the market prices became better understood.

The fact that dollars existed became more widely known.  People learned that each dollar bought more and more Zaires.  Of course there were no US Dollars in circulation and the only people who had seen any, were the merchants who did business in foreign countries.  This gave opportunity for counterfeit money to be created.  The most common bill to copy was the $100 note.  A colored photocopy on almost any kind of paper would probably pass for a while undetected.  It was known that the missionaries from America knew all about dollars.

One day a young man brought me a paper that said American Express Check on the top and was filled in for 10 US dollars.  It wasn’t all that fancy and was on A5 size paper.  He wanted to know how much it was worth.  An American tourist traveling by bicycle had stopped to eat and sleep at his guest house near Mahagi.  The man had paid with the American Express Travelers Check that he offered for my inspection.  I told him the truth.  It was worthless.  I was ashamed that this man had been cheated by an American tourist traveling across Africa.  The paper was a counterfeit, intended to get what the cyclist wanted in exchange for something worthless.

Merchants who imported goods into Zaire, to sell for Zaires, had to buy them with a currency recognized by the foreign seller.  Outside of Zaire, no one wanted Zaires and it was nearly impossible to buy any foreign currency at the banks.  The Bunia merchants used the Zaires earned in their businesses to purchase local products to export to someone who would pay with a currency that could be exchanged in any foreign bank.  The preferred currency was the US$. 

The merchant was, therefore, eager to sell anything he had for US$, even the millions of Zaires cash that he had accumulated during the month from his business activities.  With the published exchange rate at the bank being, for example 25 Zaires per Dollar, the merchant would offer his goods at half price if you paid in US$, and sell hundreds of thousands of Zaires at 50 Zaires per Dollar.  The Zaire was depreciating rapidly.  The government no longer had control of the value of its money.  Merchants in Watsa offered to sell Zaires to the field treasurer at 67 Zaires per dollar.  The Zaire had devalued 13,400%.

Mobutu and his government kept printing money, introducing the new green 10 Zaire note, flooding the country with more and more currency.

To revalue the currency necessitated reducing the amount of money in circulation.  Apparently Mobutu was having trouble getting what he wanted on the international market place and to get more loans he agreed to take action.  The solution was to print more money and introduce larger denomination bills, the 50, 100. 500 and 1000 Zaire notes and re-print the ten and five Zaire notes but using different colors than were currently in use.  How does that help?

Remember how the Francs were taken out of circulation?  Again the banks were to be used to exchange the now old blue 10 Zaire note for the new green one and the old green 5 Zaire note for the new blue one.  In effect all of the largest bills in existence, the ones saved by any merchant who wanted to make a major purchase, would become worthless.  A merchant with a truckload of 10 and 5 Zaire notes of the wrong colors killed himself.  Clearly, accumulating money was not a good plan to use in preparing for the future.

The Zaire continued to devalue and it became necessary to do all you could not to accumulate any money, but rather to get in debt if possible.  Foniyo Ganda, who worked at the optical center, earned more wages than he needed to live each month and wondered what to do with the money.  I told him to spend it on iron, and that is literally what he did.  He bought sheet metal roofing for a house that he might build some day.

During the school vacation month, we always traveled to Bunia in the three ton Isuzu truck to purchase several tons of supplies for the next three-month school term.  Since it took about six hours to travel to Bunia we would leave Rethy at three or four in the morning in order to get there early enough to shop in the biggest stores to find the prices of the major items on our list.  We would then calculate approximately how many millions of Zaires to order from the Field Treasurer to spend the next day.  The field treasurer usually had some cash on hand but bought more from the local merchants when he knew we would be down to do the purchasing for the dorm.  If all went well, we could buy some of the bulk items the same day.

No shop keeper had any prices marked and many of them took out a pocket calculator and after a few entries would turn the calculator around so Ellen could see the price.  She then marked down the price after the item, for example 12 – 50 Kg sacks of flour, the price in Zaires, say One hundred twenty five thousand five hundred, and the store, Bon Marche.  We were reasonably sure that would be the price today and maybe tomorrow morning.

The currency was so devalued that the ones, fives, tens, and twenties, were out of circulation.  Many of the larger bills were too much trouble to count so 625 notes were tied with twine into a brick.  A brick of 25 bundles of 25 bills of 50 Zaire notes was worth 31,250 Zaires.  That would be about 40 bricks of 50 Zaire notes to buy the needed flour.  Fortunately, the 50 Zaire notes were almost out of use too, so there wasn’t a risk of not being able to fit the money into the cab of the truck.  Bricks of 500 Zaire notes were the most common at the time so we those plus other denominations as bricks or larger notes up to the 500,000s.  It would take two gunny sacks of money to do our shopping the next day.

Nearly everything went according to plan.  Ellen worked with the shop-keeper at the counter in his store and I loaded the Isuzu truck backed up to the cement veranda just outside.  The owner wrote out the invoice by hand ordering his men to bring out the 12 bags of flour, the 10 bags of sugar, the 15 cases of Blue Band and Kimbo, the 5 cases of Omo, 12 cases of tomato paste and so on.  She checked the count as did I as I packed the truck.  The sacks of money were locked in the cab of the truck.  There were always many spectators, including children.  I had Marko with me to guard the truck when I went in to see how things were going.

Ellen was distressed, looking around frantically.  Her purse had disappeared.  I checked in the truck and it wasn’t there.  I relocked the door and returned to find her telling the shopkeeper emphatically,

“Yes I want it back!”

It seems he had had this happen before and of course he knew there couldn’t be a significant amount of money in the purse anyway, unless it was all in $100 bills.  It wasn’t that big a purse!

The shop owner may have been disappointed when she said that there was no money in it, but she insisted that she did want the papers and other items in the purse.  She had been writing on a pile of papers where all the calculations and accounting for the shopping trip were being made when, the purse at her elbow had been stolen.  Amazingly, after a few commands to those standing around and to his workers who were bringing out the goods from the store-room, the purse was found and returned.  Buying a truckload of supplies there had to be bundles of $100 bills in that purse!  I guess they had checked.  The shopkeeper may still have hoped to receive payment with a bank transfer of US$ when the Bwana who was loading the truck came in to settle the bill.

He did come in to settle the bill, bringing in bricks of money in a sack, to count down the invoice as much as possible until Ellen could pay off the balance with the higher denomination Zaire notes from the large manila envelope under her stack of papers.  The merchant swept the bricks of money into a huge bottom drawer and his quick fingered cashier girls counted out the balance from the larger Zaire notes.  After laying down the pre-counted bundles of 25 notes, the girls immediately broke the packets and began recounting, too quickly to for me to verify and, often came up short.  The implication was that I was trying to cheat the merchant.  The field treasurer had made up the packets and I trusted him and his counting assistant rather than the cashier girls, but what can one do?  I can’t count that fast so somebody got a tip.

From Bon Marche we went to other big merchants to continue filling the lists in a similar manner, salt, paint, kerosene, gasoline and other necessities, trying to also buy for others what they ordered.  We bought all we could, and planned to return to Rethy the next day.  We had, with God’s help been able to fill the truck with supplies for the next term.

No matter how the money looks, and the 1,000,000 Zaire note was beautiful, one assumes that goods and services can be purchased in the country that issued the money.  All the advanced security features were incorporated including the embedded metallic strip with 3-D images, the microscopic printing, the raised ink, the shadow image when held up to the light and so on.  No one would be ever able to counterfeit those bills, but why even try?  New ones were put into circulation daily. Storing up treasure in Zaire as Zaires cash was foolish.

For all practical purposes the Zaire, itself, was counterfeit!

The best exchange is to repent, deny yourself and give your life to Jesus.