Notaphily
The bills in this collection have been collected over a decade or so, and the range of what’s been amassed confirms Muhumuza as a serious notaphilist. A good number of the banknotes were collected during Muhumuza’s travels abroad. Many were donated to him by colleagues, friends and others who knew of his interest in bills and responded to it, and two of them deserve acknowledgement for their generosity: his cousin Brian and his colleague Ben. Most of the bills were acquired via Robert’s World Money, the US-based group that helps notaphilists around the world to expand their collections. The finest bills are works of art in and of themselves, and even when they are boring they are still interesting enough to be studied for the details that might say something distinct about a particular country.
One thing that’s remarkable about bills from all over the world is the fact that they often center men and not women: from Yahya Jammeh, the former Gambian leader, to the Latin American hero Simon Bolivar. If we accept that ours is no longer a man’s world, this trend is not cool. And so it warms the heart to see Maria Montessori on an old bill from Italy, and the artist Debora Arango on a bill that remains legal tender in Colombia. Some of the bills in this collection are truly wonderful – in the sense that they were made at the right pitch of modern design, art, and respect for local knowledge: Australia, Georgia, Cook Islands, Armenia, Denmark, Haiti, North Macedonia, Mauritania, Colombia, Switzerland, South Africa, Zaire.
The correct way would have been to show the obverse and reverse sides of each bill, but technically this proved a challenge. Deo volente, this can be rectified in the future. For now, take a look and see if there’s something you dig:
