5 Centimes

Mokta-El-Hadid was one of the largest iron ore mining operations in colonial Algeria, and Bénisaf — its port and extraction site on the Oran coast — functioned as a largely self-contained industrial town. During the First World War, the acute shortage of small change throughout French Algeria drove numerous private employers to issue their own low-denomination emergency scrip. This note is one of those — a purely local instrument, redeemable only within the company's own commercial ecosystem and worthless the moment a worker left the site.

The Compagnie de Mokta-El-Hadid had French metropolitan backing, but day-to-day life at Bénisaf ran on whatever the company chose to circulate.