Another story of the breakup of the Ottoman empire and another British mandate to try to stand between different races. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The design of this stamp is one of the longest lived I have come across. As it states on this jubilee edition the design dates from 1898. What the stamp doesn’t make clear is the design with very few modifications was in use until independence in 1956. There was no 1998 100th anniversary version but the stamp was not done. It came back virtually unchanged in a 2003 issue, except reflecting the current debased currency. The camel rider is actually a postman.
Todays stamp is issue A9 a two Piaster stamp issued by the Sudan on October 1st 1948. It was a single stamp issue that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Sudanese stamp issue in 1898. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents.
Sudan in theory was to be jointly administered by Egypt and Great Britain as the Ottoman Empire was fading. The Egyptian royal family was still tied to the Ottomans but the reality was that the British in Sudan were running the show. There is a divide in the country as the north is Arabic and Muslim with traditional ties to Egypt. The south is black and not Muslim. The British addressed this by having a closed door policy to the south, with no outsiders allowed in. This did not sit well with the Arabs to the north. Britain pretty much left the south alone except for tamping down on tribal warfare and fighting the banned slave trade.
The north saw much more development. The Nile was damned and the increase in arable land was taken by cotton plantations. Railroads and new Port Sudan allowed for exports. Khartoum also grew with more Sudanese taking their place in the administration. Into this Egypt declared it’s independence but left vague its claim on Sudan. The British Governor General of Sudan was then assassinated in Cairo and the British then removed all Egyptians from the Sudanese administration and armed forces. The northern Sudanese were divided as to whether they wanted a union with Egypt and the south was divided as to whether they wanted to stay with Sudan or go with the then British colony of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. At this point the British were getting ready to leave and so the question was who to turn it over to.
The independence movement was overwhelmingly Northern and Arab but strangely its leader was a southern black named Ali Abd al Latif. He was part of an educated group of blacks that became left wing politicized and agitated for insurrection. This landed Ali in jail and later exiled to Egypt and put in an insane asylum where he died in 1948. His fame grew though and his white flag movement provided a good cover for the Northern Arab minority who wanted independence from both Britain and Egypt to succeed taking over the whole country.
The south of Sudan was hardly at all consulted and the division left Sudan divided with a hot and cold civil war that still did not end when South Sudan became independent in 2005. The British did manage to get out of the Sudan in the mid 1950s so probably are the real winners of the story.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the camel riding postman on todays stamp. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.