A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [249]
Members of Kester’s family were themselves maimed in the conflict:
I wasn’t affected directly by the civil war, but I have two relatives who lost their legs. One stepped into a minefield and she lost her leg, and the other, a cousin of mine, lost his leg because he was fighting with FRELIMO.
And yet Kester made this throne as a means of conveying hope. Two rifle butts form the back of the chair. If you look closely at them it seems as though they have faces – two screw holes for eyes and a strap slot for the mouth. They almost seem to be smiling. It is a visual accident that Kester spotted and decided to exploit which denies the guns their central purpose and gives this work of art its fundamental meaning, as he himself explains:
There is no conflict between us any more. I didn’t carve the smile, it’s part of the rifle butt. The screw holes and the mark left from where the strap was attached to the gun. So I chose the guns and the weapons that had the most expression. At the top you can see a smiling face. And there is another smiling face – the other rifle butt. And they are smiling at each other as if to say, ‘Now we are free.’
99
Credit Card
Issued in the United Arab Emirates
AD 2009
If you were to ask people which twentieth-century invention had most impact on their daily lives today, instant answers might be their mobile phone or their PC: not many people would think first of the little plastic rectangles that fill their wallets and purses. And yet, since they first emerged in the late 1950s, credit cards and their kin have become part of the fabric of modern life. Bank credit is, for the first time in history, no longer the prerogative of the elite, and – maybe as a result – long-dormant religious and ethical issues about the use and abuse of money have been reborn in the face of this ultimate symbol of economic freedom for millions, as some would see it, or, for others, of triumphant Anglo-American consumer culture.
In the last two chapters, we examined sex and war. Now it is the turn of that third great constant of human affairs, money. Money has featured throughout this history, from the gold coins of the legendarily rich King Croesus of Lydia (Chapter 25), and the paper money of the first Ming emperor (Chapter 72), to the first world currency, the king of Spain’s silver pieces of eight (Chapter 80). Now it is the turn of the modern manifestation of money – plastic.
The modern credit card is an American creation, the successor to retail credit schemes pioneered in the early twentieth century. After the end of the Second World War, wartime restrictions on lending were lifted and the credit boom began. The first general-purpose charge card was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1950. In 1958 the next step came with the appearance of the first real credit card, issued by a bank and generally accepted by large numbers of businesses. This was the BankAmericard, ancestor of Visa, and the first universal credit card to be made of plastic. But only in the 1990s did credit cards become truly global, widespread beyond North America and the UK.
Of course, a credit card isn’t itself money – it is a physical object that provides a way of spending money, moving it and promising it. Money is now more likely to be numbers and digits on statements and invoices than physical coins and notes. None of us is ever likely to see most of our savings turned into actual cash, even in a bank vault. Credit and debit cards bring home to us daily the fact that money has now lost its essential materiality; money spent through them is always new, fresh and unused. It can be called up virtually anywhere in the world instantaneously, regardless of national boundaries. Where as all the coins or banknotes we have looked at so far