That Africans are structurally and historically moved by an uncontrollable lust for material objects remains a powerful component of Western knowledge. Surging in the 16th century on the coast of Guinea, diffused by merchants' narratives back in Europe, theorized in the 17th and 18th century by philosophers, and hardened in the 19th century as a commonplace stereotype, the idea that Africans are possessed by a misguided hunger for imported commodities and material riches, has a genealogy as ancient as the first contacts between West Africa and foreign sailors. These Western fabrications have obscured many of the complex, real strategies of local societies to engage with material and immaterial wealth. To critically examine these propositions I propose to group them together under the term of "double material curse." Belonging to different periods and to various disciplines and social spheres, the double material curse, I argue, has worked, and still works, as a complex cluster of theories, opinions, and decisions, historically fluid yet enduring, to placate the relationships that Africans supposedly nurture with various forms of assets.