The Demonization of the Manila Currency in Southeastern Nigeria, 1902 – 1949 – I.R. Amadi (2003)
Dr. I.R Amadi focuses attention on yet another subject which attracted Professon Bassey Andah’s reserch interested. Scholars, pre-occupied with matter of distribution and exchange as opposed to those of production and relations, distorted the role and significance of pre-colonial currencies like manilla in the economic life of African peoples. Professor Bassey Andah had in fact drawn attention to these distortions which tended to classify African economies as peasant and primitive and lacking in self-regulating market mechanism such as monetary exchange system in his African Anthropology (1988).
Dr Amadi examines the role of manilla as currency and shows that its withdrawal from circulation was not as a result of its limited adequacy but rather because “like other items of indigenous culture, it had to make way for the priviledged European currency.”
