Busacca Gallery

A Bronze-alloy adornment, this Manilla money bracelet was created in ancient Africa. Bronze bracelets (properly called Manillas) were worn both for personal adornment and for use as money. Their use dates back to at least the late 16th century and possibly much earlier. In Africa, jewelry is worn for multiple purposes beyond mere adornment. It can be used to indicate one's role in society, as having a particular profession or rank, as well as to indicate belonging to a specific family, clan, or village. A form of wealth, it is also intrinsically valuable and therefore worn by itinerants who must travel with all their worldly possessions. Often there are particular recognizable motifs worn by women who have had children, thus indicating the wearer's successful completion of her fundamental role in society. Jewelry among contemporary Mande peoples is often commissioned by patrons in response to the advice of a diviner. Like other amulets made by smiths, the jewelry is embedded with spiritual power and is intended to assist the wearer with specific concerns, for example, to increase fertility, to deter accidents, for financial gain, to cure or prevent diseases, to inspire love, and so on. Metal is believed to naturally contain high levels of nyama, or life forces, and is therefore particularly powerful in the production of medicinal amulets.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manillas

Manillas are penannular armlets, mostly in bronze or copper, very rarely gold, which served as a form of money or barter coinage and to a degree, ornamentation, amongst certain West African peoples (Aro Confederacy, Guinea Coast, Gold Coast, Calabar and other parts of Nigeria, etc.). This form of African currency also became known as "slave trade money" after the Europeans started using them to acquire slaves for the slave trade into the Americas (as well as England prior to 1807).



The name manilla is said to derive from the Spanish for a bracelet manella, the Portuguese for hand-ring, or after the Latin manus (hand) or from monilia, plural of monile (necklace). They are usually horseshoe-shaped, with terminations that face each other and are roughly lozenge-shaped. The most popular African name for manillas, Okpoho, comes from the Igbo language.

The Africans of each region had names for each variety of manilla, probably varying locally. They valued them differently, and were notoriously particular about the types they would accept. Manillas were partly differentiated and valued by the sound they made when struck.

A report by the British Consul of Fernando Po in 1856 lists five different patterns of manillas in use in Nigeria. The Antony Manilla is good in all interior markets; the Congo Simgolo or 'bottle-necked' is good only at Opungo market; the Onadoo is best for Old Calabar, Igbo country between Bonny and New Kalabari; the Finniman Fawfinna is passable in Juju Town and Qua market; but is only half the worth of the Antony; and the Cutta Antony is valued by the people at Umballa.

The proliferation of African names is probably due more to regional customs than actual manufacturing specialization. The 'Mkporo' is likely a Dutch or British manilla and the 'Popo' is French, but the rest are examples of a single evolving Birmingham product.

An important hoard had a group of 72 pieces with similar patination and soil crusting, suggesting common burial. There were 7 Mkporo; 19 Nkobnkob-round foot; 9 Nkobnkob-oval foot; and 37 Popo-square foot. The lightest 'Nkobnkobs' in the hoard are 108 and 114gm, while they are routinely found (called Onoudu) under 80gm, this implies that the group was buried at a certain point in the size devolution of the manilla. Mkporo are made of brass. The weight correspondence of the oval-foot Nkobnkob with the high end of the round-foot range suggests that it is either the earlier variety, or contemporary with the earliest round-foots. The exclusive presence of the 'square-foot' variety of French Popo, normally scarce among circulation groups of Popos, suggests that this is the earliest variety. The earliest French manillas as likely to be contemporaries of the earliest British (or Dutch?) pieces.

Sometimes distinguished from manillas mainly by their wearability are a large number of regional types called 'Bracelet' monies and 'Legband' monies. Some are fairly uniform in size and weight and served as monies of account like manillas, but others were actually worn as wealth display. The less well off would mimic the movements of the 'better off' who were so encumbered by the weight of manillas that they moved in a very characteristic way. The larger manillas had a much more open shape.





Some sources attribute their introduction to the ancient Phoenicians[8] who traded along the west coast of Africa or even early Carthaginian explorers and traders. The Egyptians have also been suggested as they used penannular money. One interesting suggestion is that Nigerian fishermen brought them up in their nets from the shipwrecks of European wrecks or made them from the copper 'pins' used in wooden sailing ships wrecked in the Bight of Benin. One theory is that if indigenous, they copied a splayed-end Raffia cloth bracelet worn by women, another that the well-known Yoruba Mondua with its bulbous ends inspired the manilla shape.

Copper bracelets and legbands were the principal 'money' and they were usually worn by women to display their husband's wealth. Early Portuguese traders thus found a pre-existing and very convenient willingness to accept unlimited numbers of these 'bracelets' and they are referred to by Duarte Pacheco Pereira who made voyages in the 1490s to buy ivory tusks, slaves, and pepper. He paid 12 to 15 manillas of brass for a slave, less if they were of copper. By 1522 in Benin a female slave of 16 cost 50 manillas and King Miguel of Portugal put a limit of 40 manillas per slave to stop this inflation.

Earliest report on the use of Manillas in Africa points to its origin in Calabar the capital city of the Akwa Akpa state of coastal Southeastern Nigeria. It has been documented that in 1505 at Calabar, (Nigeria) Manillas were being used as a medium of exchange, one manilla being worth a big elephant tooth, and a slave cost between eight and ten manillas. They were also in use on the Benin river in 1589 and again in Calabar in 1688, where Dutch traders bought slaves against payment in rough grey copper armlets which had to be very well made or they would be quickly rejected.

In addition to the earliest report, the origin of Manillas from Calabar for use in Africa and particularly Nigeria is also confirmed by the African and universal other name for Manillas as Okpoho, which is an (Efik/Annang/Ibibio) word for money which is used throughout this report and in the titles of images in this report.