A big, impressive, long bridge allowing a railroad and people to cross the Zambezi river. An impressive accomplishment that could have never happened without outside help. If you are a development company, that hasn’t actually developed anything, why not try to take credit, especially when your contract is almost up for renewal. 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.
Today we cover an early version of a common third world stamp. Where a stamp celebrates a new piece of infrastructure while obscuring and ignoring the generosity through which it happened. Mozambique then or now could have never built such a large, long lasting bridge on it’s own. Neither however could the Mozambique Company, the British owned for profit entity that was incorporated to develop the area. Yet this bridge is all over their stamps.
Todays stamp is issue A52, a 5 Escudo stamp issued by the Mozambique Company on May 16th,1937 for use in their region of the Portuguese Colony of Mozambique. It was part of a 19 stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.50 unused.
Portugal was not a rich country. It did not have resources to invest in all the colonies that had been provided to them by the voyages of Vasco de Gamma. Mozambique on the southern east coast of Southern Africa was such a place. The Mozambique Company was formed in Portugal with mainly British investors to develop the area around the new city of Beira in 1891. The company had the right to tax and was to develop the area and provide services and security to the area. The city was the nearest coastline to the landlocked British colony of Rhodesia and a train line, including this bridge over the Zambezi River was a joint Portuguese and British project with the bridge completing in 1934. It was hoped that the user fees would pay the interest on the loan to build the bridge while also funding a sinking fund to pay off loan principal. The fees were too low to even pay the interest and the loan defaulted. Indeed the whole area suffered from lack of development and the administration contract for the colony was not renewed although the company continued operating certain operations and plantations.
The bridge, now called the Dona Ana Bridge, has gone through many rough periods since. It was heavily damaged during the post independence civil war. In the 1990s it was restored by USA aid but no longer as a railroad bridge but as a foot and light vehicle bridge. It was heavily damaged again in floods in 2000. In 2011 the Mozambique government had plans to reintroduce a railway to the bridge but those plans came to naught and a further renovation in 2017 allowed it to continue as a footbridge.
The Mozambique company still exists, sort of. In the 1950s, the company built an art deco Grande Hotel in Beira. It was again hoped to attract white Rhodesians to drive in for a beach vacation. Again the project never made money and closed in 1965, though the pool was still used and the ballroom available for weddings. After independence, the large concrete shell of the hotel was taken over by thousands of homeless people despite no longer having electricity or water. The communist and later governments never nationalized the property as they then would have had to take responsibility for demolition and relocation of the homeless. The deadlock has now continued for 45 years.
Well my drink is empty and I am wondering if this is one of those places that Vasco de Gamma should have just sailed past. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2019.