5 Francs

The Banque de l'Afrique Occidentale held a unique position among colonial monetary institutions — it was a private bank, not a state body, operating under a series of French government concessions that granted it sole right of issue across French West Africa. That arrangement made its notes an unusual hybrid: private paper backed by colonial authority, circulating across territories from Senegal to Niger.

Printing by the Banque de France conferred a degree of technical quality that the BAO's own resources could never have matched, though the relationship was one of contracted service, not institutional merger. Notes from this long print run span a politically volatile stretch, from mid-Depression austerity through the ruptures of the Second World War and the Vichy administration's complicated relationship with its African territories.