The Language of Nigerian Money

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CURRENCY
DECEMBER 13, 2015
The Language of Nigerian Money
BY CAELAINN HOGAN

The obverse of Nigeria’s old hundred-naira banknote, at top, and the reverse of its replacement, above.CREDIT


Last year, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a new hundred-naira note to commemorate the union, in 1914, of the predominantly Muslim North and the predominantly Christian South. The redesigned bill includes a digital code that smartphone users can scan to see a timeline of currency used in the region, set against images of cowrie shells, which were used as currency in Nigeria before 1700, and manilla, a horseshoe-shaped metal bracelet that was historically adopted by Europeans to acquire slaves. These features of the new design were overshadowed, though, by an adjustment to the way the denomination was presented. On past banknotes, the words “Naira dari,” Hausa for “one hundred naira,” had appeared in Arabic script. Now, the Hausa was printed, like the Yoruba and Igbo, in small Roman letters, to the right of the larger centered text in English, the country’s official language. The change proved controversial.

The new bill, which was conceived under former President Goodluck Jonathan, an evangelical from the South, tapped into a deep historical divide and provoked strong reaction from Nigeria’s two major religious groups. Some Christians supported the move as a step toward de-Islamizing Nigeria, while many Muslims called it Islamophobic. Cletus Alu, a member of the Christian Association of Nigeria, in Abuja, told me that he would like to see the script removed from all of the country’s banknotes. “Nigeria is a secular nation,” he said. “It’s not good to give prominence to one religion or another.”

The country’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the North, has thus far stayed clear of the controversy. And so, this October 1st, on the eve of the fifty-fifth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, the Lagos-based organization Muslim Rights Concern publicly demanded that the government reinstate the Arabic script. In a statement published on the group’s Web site, its director, Ishaq Akintola, described the change “as an act of hostility taken to spite Muslims” and claimed that some Christians had been “secretly agitating” for it. (Previously, the organization had accused Jonathan of replacing the Ajami with a symbol resembling the Star of David, in a bid to promote Zionism.)

On a drenched autumn evening, I met with Musa S. Muhammad, an archivist in his fifties, at a building in the Arewa House complex, beside the grand Sultan Bello Mosque in the northern city of Kaduna, to get a sense of the historical currents underlying the controversy. Arabic script, he told me, had been printed on nearly every note since the naira was introduced, in 1973, and on previous currency as well. To demonstrate, he instructed a colleague to remove a tenth-of-a-penny coin from a vivid twist of fabric. The piece was minted in 1945, under the British colonial regime, and three languages were stamped on its silvery face: King George VI’s name appeared in Latin, and the coin’s value was spelled out in both English and Hausa, with the latter spelled out in Arabic.

“This is politics between South and North,” Muhammad said, of the current dispute. He spoke with careful deliberation, his deep, raspy voice softened by a lisp. As he ran a finger over the Arabic script on a five-hundred-naira note sitting before him, the evening call to prayer rang out from the mosque, muffled by the rain. The letters on the currency, he said, are as secular in origin as the Roman alphabet used in modern Bibles. “Any non-Arab language written in Arabic script we call Ajami,” he said. “They feel that this is religious, but it’s not.” He leafed through the loose pages of an old manuscript written in Ajami, one of thousands that he is currently digitizing.

abducted by Boko Haram from a school in Chibok last April. These daily vigils have evolved, over time, into a platform for citizens to discuss the issues of the day. Raising their voices above the low hum of early evening traffic, the event’s three speakers all emphasized the need to set aside ethnic and religious divides.

Afterward, I spoke with Aisha Yesufu, a mother of two in her early forties, who wore a red abaya printed with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. “This country is full of people from different religious backgrounds and different languages,” she said. “People will always say it will not be easy for Nigerians to be united, but Bring Back Our Girls, we proved that wrong, we’ve been a united force.”

Yesufu is a Muslim from the South, but she’d lived in Kaduna in 2008, as Boko Haram was gaining support. She told me that she was concerned about the implications of Ajami’s removal from the country’s currency. “They took it off, maybe due to fear of Islamization, but that’s just hypocrisy as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “If you still have the English and it’s not Christianizing, why is the one in the Arabic Islamizing?”

A Controversy Over Arabic Script on Nigeria’s Money - The New Yorker