500 Nouveaux Zaïres

By 1994, the Banque du Zaïre was printing money in denominations that would have seemed absurd a decade earlier. The 500 Nouveaux Zaïres note was part of the "new zaïre" redenomination introduced in 1993, at a rate of 1 NZ to 3,000,000 old zaïres — itself a measure of how completely Mobutu's government had destroyed the currency through deficit monetization. The redenomination bought almost no time; inflation continued at several thousand percent annually, and notes like this one were obsolete almost as soon as Giesecke & Devrient delivered them.

The series was superseded in 1997 when Laurent-Désiré Kabila renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo and replaced the zaïre entirely.