By Rostand CHOUATAT DANTSE, Systemic Analyst, Heterodox Economist, Expert in frugal innovations for Africa.
Rethinking the CFA from its undeniably African DNA
Prologue
The end of economic innocence
Long before the advent of modern currencies, banks, and financial markets, African societies had fully functional economic systems organized around relationships, redistribution, and social recognition. Exchange was first and foremost a mechanism of connection; work produced a sense of belonging; wealth was demonstrated by the ability to redistribute rather than accumulate. Value was based on a form of social energy: relational density, human strength, and community continuity. Money—when it existed—was not an autonomous capital, but a symbolic support validating a social position and collective memory.
This model ensured cohesion, compromise, and resilience. However, it had a structural limitation: it struggled to transform time and resources into sustainable economic power. Wealth circulated but was not deeply ingrained in institutions capable of accumulating and transmitting it. Effort did not become structure; expenditure did not convert into cumulative productive capital. Africa’s integration into the global economy was less about the progressive construction of these structures than the passive insertion of its materials and bodies into external systems of valuation. Thus ends a form of economic innocence: wealth ceases to be primarily relational and becomes abstract, measurable, and instrumental.
I. However, natural resources, prestige, and lack of capitalization
African monetary history is ancient, but it reveals a constant: the difficulty in transforming economic prestige into capital. Pharaonic gold was first part of a cosmic and symbolic logic. Its function was not productive investment but the representation of sacred power. Later figures like the Queen of Sheba or Mansa Musa illustrated a remarkable ability to mobilize and redistribute wealth. However, this power was rarely integrated into cumulative economic structures. Mansa Musa’s gold, a manifestation of real abundance, would mark world monetary history. Wealth was displayed, shared, celebrated, and instrumentalized—rarely transformed into lasting productive institutions. This is not a moral flaw in itself but a systemic choice inherited, favoring social legitimacy over impersonal accumulation. This memory still influences today’s relationship with expenditure, prestige, and money.
II. The CFA franc: crystallization of a systemic heritage
The CFA franc cannot be reduced to a colonial vestige or a mere monetary technique. It represents a historical crystallization, where ancient African logics overlap with modern European and international mechanisms. The CFA does not replace previous African structures; it faithfully attaches itself to them. Born on December 26, 1945, in the context of France’s adherence to the Bretton Woods agreements and the new international monetary architecture (IMF), adjustable fixed exchange rates, reserve discipline, and especially Keynesianism (from which African states, under political and social pressures, struggle to emancipate)—the CFA franc bears the direct imprint of this monetary order. It also obviously inherits Colbertism, this French administrative tradition marked by centralization, institutional continuity, and mercantilism.
On one hand, it fits into societies where value has long been thought of as social circulation and symbolic recognition. On the other hand, it introduces a monetary architecture based on discipline, accounting, external constraint, and nominal stability. The CFA is hybrid: stabilizing and limiting. Ontologically and systemically African, institutionally and technically French (Western). It imposes monetary rigor on economies whose productive, fiscal, and social structures are not prepared for the organic learning of autonomous management of these rules. The CFA acts as a mirror. It reveals not external domination but an internal deficit of institutional transformation. It protects against certain major macroeconomic errors, but it delays the necessary systemic learning to move beyond it.
This mechanism goes beyond the CFA zone. Equivalents with other specificities are found in many African economies outside the zone: monetary instability, dependence on raw materials, weak productive capitalization, institutional weakness, strong dependence on foreign currencies, technological and financial stagnation. The “CFA problem” is thus a concentrated expression of the African problem: the difficulty in converting material, social, and human energy into lasting institutional memory, a deficit in economic learning, economic and social innovation.
III. The African Man: From tradition to a constraining concept
Every economy is based on an implicit anthropology. The dominant modern model has defined man as a rational productive resource, endowed with concrete and abstract rights and duties, the foundation of industrialization and progress. The African vision is not automatically incompatible with the modern economy; it simply requires an adequate and binding institutional translation (legally), with structures capable of converting this human energy into cumulative capital.
The ontology of the relationship carries a seed of immobility: Man, although socially central, remains economically and politically peripheral in Africa. If humans are to remain the cell of the social body, they must also be recognized as a sovereign unit, as they are the only true engine of the technological and economic breakthrough we urgently need to finally transform raw materials, produce innovations, sell them domestically and internationally, and actively participate in the global economy, actively present in international markets. The African man must be granted the right to success and wealth, a necessary step towards healthy solidarity. Their efforts should not be leveled, consumed, redistributed, or exported but capitalized. Recognizing man as the source of development implies an epistemic rupture: building institutions capable of channeling and inscribing this energy over time. Without this ability, no economy, no currency—stable or sovereign—can produce sustainable development, and talents and wealth will be destined to flee to more secure shores.
IV. The CFA as a currency-museum and laboratory
The CFA, not only a currency but also a vast common market, can (must) be reinterpreted. It represents a living museum currency for all of Africa, symbolically compressing its monetary history: ancient social circulation, integration into global trade, modern administrative stabilization, and contemporary monetary discipline. A laboratory ready to experiment with the complexity of the modern economy.
One must recognize a fact often avoided: the monetary administration of the CFA represents a real institutional success in Africa. Relative budget discipline, administrative continuity, accounting rigor, regional coordination, and external anchoring have ensured rare stability on the continent, with many internal and external advantages left untapped.
Whether the CFA is seen as a hindrance or an opportunity, it does not exempt Africa from the imperative of economic (and social) transformation, constant monetary and financial reforms. The CFA could have—and still can—become an African laboratory for monetary maturity: a stable framework for experimenting and gradually building internal sovereignty. Stability has been used as protection; it could become pedagogy.
Conclusion
The test of maturity / Beyond currency, Africa
The debate on the CFA should no longer pit denunciation against defense. It should be understood as a test: the African capacity to learn from money rather than be protected by it. The CFA is neither the heart of the problem nor its definitive solution. It reveals a deeper challenge: the capitalization of time, effort, and value. It offers a rare chance—to learn discipline in a stable environment—but this chance is neither automatic nor eternal. Rethinking the CFA means posing the central question: not what currency for Africa, but what African capacity to produce, carry, and transmit a currency. This leads us to the central question: what economy for Africa?
Through the prism of the CFA, which is of unprecedented relevance, we are actually talking about deep Africa. The monetary debate is just a narrow perspective of a perhaps very complex but rational architecture, sprinkled with systemic paradoxes. For example: the paradox of Mansa Musa, king of gold without a currency in his image; his empire preferring the denar for its exchanges. The paradox of hierarchy and status fetishism, which prohibits individual accumulation and strongly contributes to Lucas’s paradox: African countries export more capital and talent than they attract!
Hughes Moussy talks about the syndrome of premature redistribution, and Axel Kabou about the rent atavism: this leveling, disguised under African solidarity, a certain sanction of individual success and wealth, hinders the formation of endogenous productive capital. Rethinking the CFA is therefore posing the question of our capacity, as Africans, to produce, carry, and transmit lasting power, and especially to develop autonomous economic thinking alongside classical currents. One of the major priorities, still little debated, is to break the erasure of the individual, bearer of innovations, progress, and movement. The CFA is surely a problem like any other currency, regardless of the strength of the economy that carries it. And even if it is a vestige of neocolonialism by France, the IMF, or other powers, that is just fair game: no currency is immune to economic hostilities. Any new African currency will have to, from its inception, face the cold, brutal world, and the exponentially increasing complexity of algorithms and international markets. However, some social and institutional concepts are specific and persistent, and must therefore precede, temporally and energetically, the debate on currency.
By questioning the CFA, we have outlined the contours of an Africa that must now choose between static harmony and dynamic power.
Currency is the daughter of the economy, and the economy is the daughter of anthropology.
P.S: The establishment of “zero customs duties” by China from May 1, 2026, is a masterstroke whose geopolitical and monetary disruption will soon render any controversy over the CFA completely obsolete in the face of the brutality of these new flows and the macroeconomic reconfiguration of the world.
