25 Sylis

Guinea's sylis series of the 1970s and early 1980s sits within one of the more ideologically charged monetary experiments in post-independence West Africa. The syli replaced the Guinean franc in 1972 under Sékou Touré, deliberately severing the country's last formal monetary tie to the CFA zone and the French-backed architecture that underpinned it. By 1980, the currency was already under severe strain — chronic shortages, a black market running at multiples of the official rate, and an economy that had been largely isolated from Western credit since Touré's break with France in 1958.

The syli was abolished in 1985, two years after Touré's death, when Guinea rejoined the global financial system and reintroduced the franc. Most sylis-denominated notes were quickly withdrawn and destroyed, which contributes to the relative scarcity of circulated survivors from the final emission years.