My mother believed in our independence and would send me to pick my school fees from my big brother near Tropical bank, then come back to Grindlays and bank it. I had known that building intimately for years (I was an impossibly curious child), so naturally, I wanted to know what was inside it today.
I was told it is where the money museum sits. Wait. We have a money museum? Apparently, yes. A proper, fairly-curated one since 2006 when the bank celebrated 40 years of existence. I had to see it.
Entering ‘Grindlays bank’ again was very evocative but seeing the CNK Money Museum was even more nostalgic. There, in the display case lay the brown five shilling note my mother used to give me daily for ‘break time’ at school.
There also lay the stringed cowry shells looking like a witchdoctor’s necklace, which Diana Rwomushana, the head of the museum, told me were our first money brought by the Arabs. Cowry shells worked alongside the ancient barter trade, where items including crude salt (kisula) and bark cloth were popular.
The string is how one kept one’s ‘bundle’ of money safely around the waist or neck. In 1896, the Indian rupee (lupiiya) was introduced and became especially popular during the 1910 to 1916 construction of the East African railway by Sikhs, a time that also saw the German East African Hale – a fancy coin from Tanzania – phase out barter trade and cowry shells. The rupee’s smallest denomination was called a Pice, from which the Kiswahili word pesa for money is derived.
At the time, according to Rwomushana, the country still had no bank, but money was handled under the Imperial British East Africa Company until 1919 when the East African Currency Board took over, based in Jinja where Bank of Uganda’s regional currency centre currently sits.
The museum has fancy coins such as the silver Florin introduced by the currency board in 1920 and 1921. Under the currency board, Britain, our coloniser, started issuing proper shillings with the British monarch’s portrait, customized according to colony; an ugly but strong note that by 1954 exchanged favourably at 20 shillings to a pound sterling.
SWIFT CHANGES
As colonies started gaining independence and changing leadership regularly, so did the currencies start changing and losing value.
First stop was to remove the coloniser’s portrait and replace it with the Lake Victoria series (1964), named so because the note had a picture of the fresh water lake.
Then in 1966, Bank of Uganda started replacing the currency board and operating out of rented premises on Liverpool House, which used to stand at the corner of Kimathi avenue where Jubilee Insurance currently is.
The day BOU opened, then president Apollo Milton Obote also laid the foundation stone for the bank’s headquarters on Kampala road, opening in 1970 with the iconic short tower that had no fence back then and looked beautiful blending with the traffic. The bank has since grown into a three-building complex, with nine currency centres countrywide.
As we changed leaders in coup after coup, so did our money go through transformations in an impressively documented journey. The Idi Amin series came in 1973 complete with his portrait, before a 1979 series replaced Amin’s picture with the central bank image.
That pink and blue five-shilling note was particularly beautiful, with the picture of a woman picking coffee at the back. Obote came with his own currency in the 1982 to 1985 series, bearing his portrait.
When Tito Okello Lutwa overthrew him in 1985, a 1985 and 1986 series was introduced, bearing images of Makerere University main building and Parliament, among others. This too was short-lived, as the NRA/NRM overthrew Lutwa and the 1987 devaluation happened and two zeros were knocked off Lutwa’s series, introducing my brown five-shilling note from the Shs 500 note that used to depict farming activities at its back.
The 1987 series also gave us the green 20,000 note and greenish 1,000 note, before all these were replaced by the 2010 series – our current legal tender that includes the award-winning 50,000-shilling note.
The museum has all the coins – legal tender and commemorative pieces (there was one minted when Pope Paul II visited in 1993) – we have ever used, as well as currencies from other countries, including the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s 500,000,000 note!
WHERE DO OLD NOTES GO?
You will see all the bank’s past governors right from Joseph Mubiru to Kikonyogo, after whom the museum is named (he is remembered mostly for liberalizing the economy), and his successor Emmanuel Tumusiime- Mutebile (RIP).
It was a morning well spent looking at all sorts of money-related contraptions as well as finding out where the worn-out notes go. I was fascinated by the briquettes made from shredded then compressed notes.
“No note goes to waste,” Rwomushana explained, adding that the briquettes are often bought by companies including Uganda Clays, to aid in making their clay products.
This former Grindlays bank building, now part of the Central Bank complex, also houses a public library (knowledge management centre, they call it), departments for non-bank financial institutions such as Saccos and microfinance, commercial banking supervision, and the executive director, Supervision, Dr Tumubweine Twinemanzi also sits here.
There; just in case you, like me, were wondering what happens in that building.
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