Strachan & Co — the kence

Most South African collecting starts with the coins of the state — the ZAR, the Union, the Republic. The Strachan & Co tokens belong to an older, stranger story: a private currency, issued by a shop, that a whole region treated as real money for two generations. For many collectors they are the most distinctively South African things in the cabinet.

A currency for Nomansland

East Griqualand — the country around Umzimkulu and Kokstad, once called Nomansland — was remote, sparsely banked and, in the 1870s, run by the Griqua under their own Raad. When the Cape began taking over its administration, hard imperial coin was still scarce on the ground. Into that gap stepped Strachan & Company, the trading firm of Donald and Thomas Strachan and their partner Charles Brisley — men so woven into the region’s government that Brisley served as the Griqua state’s parliamentary secretary. The firm issued its own tokens, and the Raad, short of any alternative, let them circulate.

The coins they wore

Struck in England, every Strachan token was holed at the twelve o’clock position — not by accident, but so that the people who used them could thread them on a string and wear them around the neck alongside their beads. Carried that way, the tokens clinked together, and from that sound came the name by which they were known locally: the “kence”. It is one of the few currencies anywhere designed, quite literally, to be worn.

The first indigenous money

The tokens were launched in 1874, reportedly on the day Strachan & Co opened its doors, and they are widely cited as the first indigenous currency to circulate widely in South Africa — preceding the Kruger coinage of the ZAR by some eighteen years. The corroboration is unusually good for a token: the Standard Bank in Kokstad recorded that in 1878 the only money in use in the town was the Strachan & Co token, and the bank itself accepted and paid them out as local currency. Douglas Strachan’s own note recalled they were “accepted everywhere.” They went on circulating until about 1932 — a private money with a working life of nearly sixty years. (Specialists still debate how this claim sits against the earlier Griqua Town coinage, which many argue never truly circulated; the Strachan tokens’ long, documented use is what sets them apart.)

The sets and the rarities

The tokens were small denominations — pence and shillings — with both ordinary issues and scarce “in goods” varieties redeemable at the store. Collectors group them into a handful of distinct sets, and the differences in rarity are steep.

They are also, almost uniquely among tokens, usually found well worn — graded merely “Good” — precisely because they were spent and handled as real money rather than tucked away. The closely related F·C·Larkan tokens of the same region carry their own distinction: they are the only South African tokens known to have been issued by a woman.

Catalogued, then destroyed

The Strachan tokens were systematically recorded in the late 1970s by Scott Balson, whose 1978 booklet Kence: the trade tokens of Strachan & Co remains a foundation reference; the East Griqualand tokens were later studied by Milner Snell in his books on the tokens of the Transkei and of Natal, and they appear in Hern’s 2008 handbook. Then the supply was cut off at the source: when the Strachan stores were sold and the family left the former Transkei, the last remaining stock of tokens, held by Ken Strachan, was destroyed in the late 1980s. What survives is what was already in collectors’ hands — which is why so few complete sets exist.

Why they matter

The Strachan & Co tokens sit at the meeting point of numismatics and social history. They record a moment when a region governed itself, banked itself and paid itself with money that bore no monarch and no state — only the name of the store that stood behind it. For the South African collector they are a rare thing twice over: scarce in the cabinet, and singular in the story they tell.