The CFA Franc and Bitcoin: Africa’s Most Important Monetary Story
On January 13, 1963, soldiers shot Sylvanus Olympio outside the United States embassy in Lomé, Togo. He was the country’s first democratically elected president. He had been in office for two and a half years. He was 60 years old.
The timing was not random. Togo’s parliament had voted unanimously in December 1962 to create a Central Bank of Togo and a Togolese franc. Olympio was assassinated just days before he was set to cement that transition. The soldiers who killed him had received training in France. One of them, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, later seized the presidency. He held it for nearly four decades. His son Faure inherited it in 2005 and still holds power today.
The CFA franc that Olympio died trying to escape still circulates in Togo. The murder worked.
This is where Africa’s Bitcoin story actually begins. Not on a trading app. Not in a venture capital pitch deck. Instead, it begins with a president killed for trying to own his country’s money.
What the CFA franc actually is
Most people outside Francophone Africa have never heard of the CFA franc. However, it affects the daily lives of roughly 187 million people across 14 countries in West and Central Africa.
The CFA franc was officially created on 26 December 1945 by a decree of General de Gaulle. The acronym originally stood for “Franc des Colonies Françaises d’Afrique.” In English, that is the Franc of the French Colonies of Africa. Today, the name has been quietly updated to mean “African Financial Community.” The mechanics, however, have barely changed.
Two separate CFA franc zones exist today. The first covers eight countries in West Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. The second covers six countries in Central Africa: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon.
Here is how the system works in practice. First, both currencies are pegged to the euro at a fixed rate. Second, France holds veto power on the boards of both central banks. Third, member countries are required to deposit a portion of their foreign exchange reserves directly with the French Treasury. France keeps more than half of Togo’s reserves in its banks, where the Togolese people have zero oversight over how those reserves are spent. Fourth, the free movement of capital between CFA zone countries and France is guaranteed. As a result, money flows easily out of Africa and into France, while Africans hold currencies they did not design, cannot devalue, and cannot exit without consequences.
The CFA franc enabled a depleted and uncompetitive French economy to obtain resources and raw materials from the empire without spending dollars, and to benefit from captive markets. That was the original design. Notably, the design still works as intended in 2026.
The cost of the "stability" argument
Supporters of the CFA franc make one primary argument: stability. Specifically, the fixed peg to the euro prevents runaway inflation. Furthermore, it makes trade with Europe predictable.
That argument is not entirely wrong. However, it sidesteps a more important question. Stability for whom, and at what cost?
For those hoping to export competitive products, obtain affordable credit, find work, or fight for an Africa free from colonial relics, the CFA franc is an anachronism. A fixed exchange rate means member countries cannot devalue to boost exports. They cannot set their own interest rates to respond to local economic conditions. They cannot run independent monetary policy. In other words, they have central banks that cannot actually do what central banks do.
The results are visible in the data. Ghana, a country outside the franc zone, had significantly higher foreign direct investment than any other country in the region prior to its inflationary crisis. Meanwhile, many CFA zone countries remain among the poorest in the world, despite sitting on some of the richest natural resources on the planet.
Togolese economist Kako Nubkpo, an official at the West African Economic and Monetary Union, called the system “voluntary servitude.” Former Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade put it plainly in 2010. He said that after 50 years of independence, his country would manage better if it got its monetary power back.
The Eco: a rebrand, not a reform
In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron stood alongside Côte d’Ivoire’s president in Abidjan and announced a reform. The CFA franc would be renamed the Eco. French officials would no longer sit on the boards of the central banks. Headlines across the world called it a historic break from the past.
It was not. France still acts as guarantor for the new arrangement. The fixed exchange rate with the euro remains. The reforms do not grant sovereignty to member countries in terms of exchange rate and monetary policy. Furthermore, Nigeria and Ghana backed out of the Eco project once they realised France would continue to have control.
Nothing has formally happened yet. The rebranding stalled. The CFA franc still circulates. And 187 million Africans still use a currency designed in Paris in 1945 to serve French interests.
Where Bitcoin enters the story
Farida Nabourema is the founder of the Africa Bitcoin Conference. She is also a Togolese human rights activist, forced into exile, whose family has resisted the Gnassingbé regime for three generations. She did not come to Bitcoin through price speculation or technology enthusiasm. She came to it through necessity.
During the 2017 and 2018 protests in Togo, the government froze the accounts of activists and blocked donations from abroad. Resistance groups had to smuggle cash across borders to fund basic operations. Farida discovered Bitcoin around the same time the regime discovered debanking. The fit was almost too neat. A monetary network that no government can shut down, that requires no permission from the French-backed monetary architecture governing the CFA zone, that leaves no paper trail through Togolese intermediaries, that settles in seconds across any border.
She was not interested in price charts. She was interested in survival.
Today, she regularly sends Bitcoin into Togo to fund civic resistance. The regime has not figured out how to stop her. In 2022, she took the lesson continental and launched the Africa Bitcoin Conference, which now gathers Bitcoiners from more than 40 African countries every December.
As she put it in a widely shared interview with Alex Gladstein of HRF: “Bitcoin is the first time ever that there is money that is actually decentralised and accessible to anyone in the world regardless of their skin colour, ideology, nationality, amount of wealth or colonial past.” She went further. “Maybe,” she said, “we should call Bitcoin the currency of decolonisation.”
The structural fit between Bitcoin and CFA countries
Bitcoin does not just offer an alternative to the CFA franc at the individual level. It offers a structural exit from the CFA system for anyone who can hold and transact with it.
Consider what Bitcoin provides that the CFA franc denies. First, no fixed peg controlled by a foreign treasury. Bitcoin’s supply is fixed at 21 million coins, governed by code, not by Paris. Second, no mandatory reserve deposits with a foreign government. Bitcoin held in self-custody stays exactly where the holder puts it. Third, no veto power from former colonial powers on monetary policy. Nobody can devalue or revalue Bitcoin by decree. Fourth, no capital controls or permission required to move money across borders. A Bitcoin transaction from Dakar to Lagos to Lagos settles in seconds, at any hour, with no correspondent bank.
Furthermore, the Lightning Network adds the final layer. Specifically, Lightning payments settle instantly, carry no on-chain footprint thanks to onion routing, and cost a fraction of a cent. As a result, a market trader in Ouagadougou and a developer in Cotonou can transact directly, privately, and cheaply, with no French treasury involved at any step.
The coups pattern and Bitcoin
Togo is not a unique case. It is a template. France conducted 122 military interventions in West and Central Africa between 1960 and 1998. Several of those interventions targeted leaders who tried to exit the CFA zone or assert monetary independence. Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré voted in 1958 to stay out of the French Community. France responded by destroying infrastructure and flooding Guinea’s economy with counterfeit currency.
The pattern is consistent. Assert monetary sovereignty. Face consequences. The consequences range from economic sabotage to military intervention to assassination.
Bitcoin does not solve this pattern directly. Notably, it does not remove French military bases from West Africa. It does not end the Gnassingbé dynasty in Togo. However, it does something the CFA system was specifically designed to prevent. It gives individuals, businesses, activists, and communities a way to hold and move value outside the system entirely. Therefore, the exit is no longer a matter of presidential decree requiring parliamentary votes and diplomatic negotiations. Instead, it is available to anyone with a smartphone and twelve words.
What the African Bitcoin ecosystem needs to understand
Africa Bitcoin News has written at length about Kenya’s circular economies, Ethiopia’s mining sector, Nigeria’s developer pipeline, and South Africa’s merchant infrastructure. Those stories are real and important. However, none of them make complete sense without this one.
The reason Bitcoin resonates so deeply in Francophone West and Central Africa is not abstract. It is historical. People in Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, Senegal, and Cameroon do not need to be told that monetary control is a form of political control. They have been living inside that lesson for 80 years.
Furthermore, the recent wave of coups across the Sahel, from Mali to Burkina Faso to Niger, has one consistent thread. Each of those governments expelled French military forces and signalled rejection of the CFA framework. The political mood is already there. Bitcoin simply offers a practical tool that matches it.
The unfinished story
Farida is still in exile. The CFA franc that Olympio died trying to escape still circulates. The grandchildren of the people who clapped for Eyadéma at the presidential palace are still subject to the same monetary architecture.
Bitcoin did not free Togo. It has not ended the CFA franc. It has not brought Farida home.
However, it has changed one specific thing. For the first time in sixty years, a Togolese democracy movement can be funded, supplied, and sustained without permission from the very state it is trying to reform. In a continent where governments routinely freeze opposition accounts, surveil mobile money, and prosecute donors as foreign agents, that matters enormously.
Sylvanus Olympio was killed for trying to give his country its own money. Sixty-three years later, Bitcoin is giving that same country something no coup can take away.
That is Africa’s most important monetary story. And it is only getting started.
Sources
- This Is Africa — The Daughter of Togo and the Money They Cannot Seize — https://thisisafrica.me/africans-rising/the-daughter-of-togo-and-the-money-they-cannot-seize/
- Bitcoin Magazine / Alex Gladstein — Fighting Monetary Colonialism With Open-Source Code — https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-a-currency-of-decolonization
- Daily Maverick — Fighting Monetary Colonialism With Open-Source Code — https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-05-06-fighting-monetary-colonialism-with-open-source-code-the-case-of-france-and-the-cfa-nations/
- LSE Africa at LSE — The CFA Franc: French Monetary Imperialism in Africa — https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2017/07/12/the-cfa-franc-french-monetary-imperialism-in-africa/
- Tax Justice Network — The CFA Franc as a Vivid Symbol of Colonial Continuities — https://taxjustice.net/2021/03/22/the-cfa-franc-as-a-vivid-symbol-of-colonial-continuities-in-francophone-africa/
- Harvard International Review — True Sovereignty? The CFA Franc and French Influence — https://hir.harvard.edu/true-sovereignty-the-cfa-franc-and-french-influence-in-west-and-central-africa/
- The Funambulist — CFA Franc and Monetary Sovereignty on the African Continent — https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/follow-the-money/cfa-franc-and-monetary-sovereignty-on-the-african-continent
- Jacobin — The Franc Zone, a Tool of French Neocolonialism in Africa — https://jacobin.com/2020/01/franc-zone-french-neocolonialism-africa
- Journal of Democracy — Why Bitcoin Is Freedom Money — https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/why-bitcoin-is-freedom-money/
- The Elephant — Wave of Coups in Françafrique — https://www.theelephant.info/opinion/2023/09/28/wave-of-coups-in-francafrique-is-africas-oldest-autocracy-next/