1 Franc Ziguinchor

Ziguinchor's Chamber of Commerce issued this token during a chronic small-change shortage that plagued French West Africa throughout the early 1920s, when metropolitan France could not supply sufficient low-denomination coinage to the colonies. Local chambers of commerce across Senegal, Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire stepped into the vacuum, issuing their own brass nécessité pieces with the tacit approval of colonial authorities. Ziguinchor itself was a minor trading post on the Casamance River, geographically isolated from Dakar by the Gambia — a British enclave that complicated overland supply at every turn.