On wads of crisp, clean West African cash

Today I withdrew cash at a bank in Freetown. A dollar here is worth almost 4,000 leones, and the largest bill they print is 10,000. “Wait until you smell the money,” people always tell me before I come here. It’s true, or it was: money so dirty it had a special scent that rubbed off on your hands.

But they’ve remade their currency. The new notes are smaller, more colorful (and it’s not just the absence of dirt), and come with instruction guides. All around town are posters explaining the new money – its size, its metallic security strips, and how not to handle it. There’s a special poster with a section called, “Bad Ways to Handle the Leone.” For example, do not fold the leone improperly; do not soil the leone; and whatever you do, “do not store the leone indecently.” In case you aren’t certain what this means, there are illustrations which suggest all of Sierra Leone’s savings are in the brassieres of its women.

The tellers at the bank were two friendly young guys, both 28. I told them I was writing about UN peacebuilding; they told me they already had peace and didn’t need any of that nonsense. They made a compelling case: “I work here from 7 to 7,” Tenay told me. “I get home at 8, and I have to leave at 6 because of the traffic. I don’t have time for fighting.”

We chatted, and I with drew $500, or 2 million leones, all crisp green 10,000 bills. They were literally fresh: the teller had to liberate my leones from a plastic packaging. “They came today from the Central Bank,” he said as he handed them to me. I couldn’t help it; I held them to my face and fanned them with my thumb, like a drug lord in a B-movie.

I stuffed them in my bag and said, “Wow, I feel rich.”

Tenay smiled and said, “You can only be a millionaire in Africa.”