African States with Kevin Warfel
To launch my new column, I have invited Kevin Warfel, an expert on Central African States and West African States, to share some of his thoughts on collecting bank notes. Kevin is a linguist by profession, having worked in the field for more than 30 years. He leads Rapid Word Collection workshops to help members of minority language communities all over the world collect words to begin work on a dictionary of their language. You can read more about that at RapidWords.net.
Kevin began collecting old American coins in his early 20s as he encountered them in circulation. A few years later, as he became active in a coin club, a fellow member encouraged him to take an interest in foreign coins. When he moved to Burkina Faso in 1990, he found vendors in the local market who had African coins and began to grow his collection. Soon, however, those vendors began to offer him African currency, which Kevin knew nothing about. Research during his next visit in the U.S. changed that, however, and Kevin returned to Burkina Faso armed with photocopies of pages from a friend’s catalog.
The core of Kevin’s personal collection is from French West Africa (FWA) and the West African States (WAS) – no surprise since he spent 19 years altogether working in that part
