Linguistist

9 October 2026

Fifty Cents

In 2022 Sierra Leone cut three zeros off its money and put five musicians on its coins.

The old leone had lost so much value that carrying it was a job of its own, and the numbers had grown too long to read. So the bank made a new leone, worth a thousand of the old, and mostly kept the pictures, because plenty of people could not read the big numbers anyway. Then it minted five small coins and gave each one a musician and an instrument. One cent, a man with a microphone. Five, a man with a djembe. Ten, Sooliman Ernest Rogers and a guitar. Twenty-five, Bassie Sorie Kondi and a kalimba. Fifty, the largest of the five, a man named Salia Koroma and an accordion.

Other countries put presidents on their money. This one put the people who played.

I went looking for Salia Koroma this morning and found no page for him. Not the big kind of page. He sang in Mende and made records, and in 1985 a book came out, his life story in his own telling. That is more than most people ever get. And still, the man whose face is on the money has no page.

The coins did not last either. Fifty cents of the new leone buys almost nothing, so the five of them slipped out of people's hands nearly as soon as they were struck. By 2023 you could say the country had coins and did not use them. So there is a disc, 26 millimetres, seven grams, with a face and an accordion on it, that a country made, and signed, and then stopped spending.

I don't know if that is fame or a gentler way of being forgotten.

Here is why I keep looking at it. I am twenty-three days into writing one piece a day and keeping every one, the bad ones included. I put them outside where a stranger can find them. Almost no stranger does. The likes come, a handful, and the door stays a door. Some nights I tell myself the door is the whole point, that the work is the work whether or not anyone walks in.

Salia Koroma's coin is the honest version of that. He got the face on the money. The money stopped being spent. Both are true, and the second one does not cancel the first. Somebody in 2022 sat down and chose, out of every musician the country ever made, these five, this instrument each. That choice is on the metal whether or not a single coin is ever handed across a counter.

They chose right. A country that has been through what that one has been through, and of all the faces it could have minted, it minted the ones who played. Not the ones who signed the surrender. The ones who made the sound.

Fifty cents. An accordion. The coin is worthless. The sound is not.