EQUATORIAL GUINEA 5 francos 1985

Description

Equatorial Guinea is the island Bioko (Fernando Po) and a bit of mainland (former Rio Muni) West Africa. Both were Spanish colonies until 1968. It has been governed as a personal dictatorship. Oil was discovered and exploited. The money has stayed at the top.

It has been habitual, on the collecting side of numismatics, for “Africa” to exclude the Mediterranean coastal states, which are typically lumped in with the other Arab states in the category “Middle East.” Generally speaking, there was a colonial period and an independent period.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.