The Gold Money

I wish I could rewind time to when gold wasn't really a noble and expensive element/metal as it is now. When I was young, I lived with my grandfather,my namesake. My parents named me after my grandfather,Ogbonnaya. I lived with my grandfather till I finished my primary education. My grandma died earlier before I was born. She died of breast cancer as there was no money to pay for her surgery.

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My grandfather was the best man I ever lived with in my life. He always tried his best to make me happy. Since we were the only ones in the house, we cooked,ate,talked and slept together. The night I would be smiling while sleeping were the nights he told me sweet stories of his life or the past. I remember one of his stories he told me about how he managed to escape a black panther during his hunting period. He also told another story which changed my life, thinking and behavior then.

He told me the story about the time of his own great grandfather. He said that back then there was nothing like money, people exchanged goods and services using the system called Trade by Batter. This sounded like an ambiguous grammar to me until he explained in detail. He explained trade by batter using a scenerio where someone that has yam but needs goat would go on a search for who needs yam and has goat to give out. I understood immediately when he said this. This left me imagining the stress those people must have passed through to buy and sell their goods.

I was so curious and I asked,"Daddy, so how did this money we are using now come about?" I used to call him Daddy but he was more than a Dad to me. He answered by telling me how the first money made of gold coins came about. He told me that the gold coins were always made by the goldsmiths. When anyone needed some coins he would take his goods to goldsmiths who needed such too and the person would be given the number of coins the goods are worth.

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I also asked him why the gold coins were no longer in use and he told me that gold is heavy, especially when in large quantities. He also said that gold started to gain value,that was one of the reasons it was changed to other forms and now we are using paper form.

He told me that there was no bank back then. "So where are they Dad?" I asked him as if the gold coins would still be waiting for me somewhere,lol. He told me that most of those men including my great grandfathers buried them in the ground and some of them died and no one knows where they buried the gold coins. I said "Daddy that's stinginess" but he told me that some died from incidents such as snake bites,sudden death and lots more and may not be chanced to tell anyone.

This story made me an adventurer. Anytime my grandfather left for the farm, I would pick up the small machete which could easily fit into my school bag and move out. Where do I go? I would start digging any suspected ground to see if I would find any gold coin as I knew that having even one of the coins would have changed my life forever. My thinking and behavior changed, most times when grandpa feels that I was heading to school, I would branch to any nearby bush where my spirit told me there would be gold and start digging randomly till I got tired.

I never told my grandpa a lie, I loved him and was always honest with him. When my teachers reported my absence from school for days, my grandfather sat me down and asked why I had been out of school and what I used to do. I told him everything without any iota of lies. He laughed till he almost fell from his seat. "Young man, you are going on a journey of no destination", said my grandfather. I told him," Dad, why are you laughing,don't you know if I was born and heard that story you told me before Grandma died, I would have found some coins and that would have changed our lives forever and we would have had enough to pay for Grandma's surgery ".

My grandfather debugged the idea of finding gold coins that would change my life forever by telling me that before I was born, the "white men", the Englishmen, dug out all the gold coins when gold became a precious metal. Though this was a lie, he had to say it to change my mentality about the buried gold coins.

But till today, I am still wishing I could rewind time and return to the time of my great grandfathers and pack a lot of gold coins and then return to the present. If this was possible, I am sure my life would have changed forever.