What happens when you turn cold cash into a faux-floral tribute?
Giving gifts is a gift. Giving money is a contribution. So what is giving a money bouquet?
Uganda shillings make a lovely (and illegal) bouquet
Photo: Monitor
In Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, and Nigeria, it’s illegal.
And it has been for several years. Around Valentine’s Day official warnings amplify. A message purportedly from the Bank of Uganda in February 2023 proclaimed, “The public is informed that any Ugandan citizen caught misusing Uganda’s money in form of making gifts for their beloved ones will be charged and taken to prison“.
A bundle of scrunched yellow shillings tied with a bow could land you in jail? When the public cried out, the bank disowned the threat as fake, but asserted, “Mutilating or defacing Uganda Shilling banknotes and coins is prohibited. This includes using brand-new notes in floral bouquets, money cakes, or decorative gifts by gluing, taping, or pinning them together.”
The central bank contends that currency that’s been glued or stapled or otherwise “damaged can’t be processed by ATMs and counting machines, leading to costly early replacement.”
Uganda’s prohibition followed Kenya’s lead. The Kenyan government staged a more public crackdown, arresting “actress and cosmetologist, Oluwadarasimi Omoseyin, …for allegedly abusing the naira,” Kenya’s currency.
“The 31-year-old was arrested after a video of her spraying and stepping on the newly redesigned naira notes at a party surfaced online.”
Making bouquets out of money appears to have caught on in many parts of Africa and Asia around 2010 as DIY crafters (what we know today as “influencers”) showed how to make them on social media. If you’d like to try your hand at it, there are plenty of TikTok videos. Go for it!
And if you live in the U.S., that’s entirely legal, so long as you don’t mangle the bills. The problem here is our currency — so dingy, it says “packing material” instead of “bouquet.” Not so with the notes of Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and the Philippines. These make for radiant petals.
Money bouquet from the Philippines
Photo: Flowers Manila
When the money-bouquet controversy arose again six months ago, legality was less concerning than psychology and ideology. Basillioh Rukanga and Anita Nkonge, reporting for BBC from Nairobi, wrote, “it just shows that people are becoming more materialistic, seeking to buy love with money, rather than romance.” Kenyan economist Odhiambo Ramogi saw the money bouquet as just one more sign of “our capitalistic approach to life”.
It’s ironic that the money-bouquet appears to be most popular in the very countries renowned for their flower farms and exports—Kenya and Uganda, in particular. Could it be that with the industrialization of flowers there, blossoms have lost their tender cachet?
For this Afro-Centric issue, we turned back our secular bible: Jack Goody’s The Culture of Flowers. Anyone interested in the history of humanity’s handling of flowering plants will be enthralled by it. Goody’s first chapter is actually entitled “No Flowers in Africa?” An anthropologist, he drew his conclusions from an extended review of research on the subject and his own field studies in Ghana.
He writes: “In general the peoples of Africa did not grow domesticated flowers. Nor did they yet make use of wild ones to any significant extent in worship, in gift-giving or in the decoration of the body.” African arts, when representative at all, usually render human figures and animals instead.
The BBC report from Kenya reaffirmed Goody’s findings: “The idea of giving flowers is largely a foreign concept in Africa, which [economist Ramogi ] says helps explain why the culture of gifting money is more readily embraced.”
“’The African hardly gave flowers,’ he says, adding that the practice is a Western tradition and that many Kenyans would prefer money ‘to take care of a need’ rather than a flower given purely for sentimental reasons.”
Jack Goody goes further: “It is possible that the chief of Tenkodogo saw attention to flowers as a moral failing, as well it might seem to others contemplating Africa’s continuing encounter with hunger and famine. It was an attention of those who had not got their priorities right.”
Tongai Mufandaeza with a bouquet of U.S. $50s in Harare, Zimbabwe, February 2026
Photo: Aaron Ufumeli
Tongai Mufandaeza manned a stall filled with money-bouquets for customers before Valentine’s Day 2026 in Harare, Zimbabwe. His priority was selling out of money bouquets. His sales pitch managed an ingenious weave of sentimental, erotic and practical reasons to buy:
“People still love flowers, but when they see the notes on top, the love feels hotter and the gesture even more meaningful. Survival matters more in these difficult times.”
Zimbabwe has no ban on money-bouquets. Not yet.
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