On the 30th of December 1919, Colonel Amery, the British Acting Secretary of State for the Colonies, approved the establishment of the East African Currency Board (EACB).KNA AA/23/6, Summary of Proceedings of the East African Currency Board, 3rd May 1921. Following the general model established by the West African Currency Board, it was designed merely to be “from a broad point of view . . . a money changing and accounting device . . . engag[ed] only in currency administration;”W. T. Newlyn and D. C. Rowan, Money and Banking in British Colonial Africa, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 51. hardly a challenging or controversial function. Yet the EACB, attempting to replace the Indian rupee as the currency in use in the colonial East African territories, originated in crisis and went on to preside over considerable chaos in markedly inauspicious circumstances.R. M. Maxon, “The Kenya Currency Crisis, 1919–1921 and the Imperial Dilemma,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17 (1989):323–48.