Pagne

In Senegal the local cloth currency, pagne, made of tama, or strips, was increasingly supplemented by French imported indigo-dyed cloth from India called guinee . The guinee was used as currency in lower Senegal. In upper Senegal it became a larger unit equivalent to a number of pagnes. The exchange rate between guinee, pagnes, and francs became more complicated from the 1830s as a result of excessive imports of guinees and francs.

If a woman wears her sister's pagne [cloth] to go and have sexual intercourse with a man, she has committed afodegbe. This happened to the wife of a sofo recently. She took her sister's pagne, went and stayed with her husband, and then took the pagne back to her sister. As her sister's husband [the husband of the woman who took the pagne] is a sofo, the vodu caught her sister [the woman whose pagne was taken] right away. She was ill.

When young girls are first learning how to wear a pagne, sometimes we sew straps onto the corners so the pagne can be tied and doesn't fall down if they don't wrap it right.

Pagne is part of the transfer of wealth from a prospective groom to his intended wife prior to marriage or the inheritance a woman leaves for her daughters.