50 Centimes Dakar

The Chamber of Commerce emergency issues of French West Africa emerged from a coin shortage that had been building since the war years, when metropolitan France suspended normal specie shipments to its colonies. Dakar's chamber acted on its own authority in 1920, issuing aluminium tokens across several denominations to keep local commerce moving. The French colonial administration tolerated rather than sanctioned these pieces — a distinction that matters for their legal classification as necessité coinage rather than official currency.

Aluminium was the practical choice given postwar metal allocations, not a deliberate design decision.