Spain usually does not remember fondly their time as a colonial power in North Africa. Indeed a late 1950s war there attempting to hold on to long established enclaves in the Sahara, Cape Juby, and Ifni is often called the forgotten war. Well this website likes to use postage stamps to remind of the nearly forgotten. For Stamp Day in 1984, Spain joined in that effort. 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 forgotten war was won militarily but only put off the inevitable of ceding the enclaves to independent Morocco and the Spaniards departing. This stamp remembers the better time when the daring horsemen on the noble Arab charger horses were in the service of Spain delivering the mail. Indeed the main Spanish town in the Cape Juby area Villa Bens, had an airfield that was a major transshipment point for airmail going between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There was a big problem of Moors kidnapping the airmail pilots, but what is adventure without a little danger. Villa Bens is now the Moroccan town of Tarfaya, but of course the airmail like the Spanish is gone.
Todays stamp is issue A668, a 17 Peseta stamp issued by Spain on October 5th, 1984. It was a single stamp issue. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents.
Spanish fishermen operating off the southern coast of Morocco in the 18th century were often facing sneak attacks by Tekna tribesmen. Under economic and trade treaties signed by Spain with the Sultan of Morocco, this should not have been happening. Spain decided however to sign a further treaty and pay an additional tribute so that Sultan Slimane would cede the coastal strip of land near Cape Juby to Spain. In 1797 a British private company North West Africa Company set up a trading post named Port Victoria next to Cape Juby. Not going through Sultan Slimane saw it attacked relentlessly by the Moroccans until the British gave up, Spain lasted almost 200 years.
You might wonder what was the attraction of the very sparsely populated by nomads area adjoining a vast dessert. Well in fact there were dreams of doing something transformative. It was imagined that if a small, short canal was dug inland from the coast near Cape Juby that water from the Atlantic could flood in to the Sahara desert turning it into a vast sea. The water then could be used for agriculture turning the whole land area around the Sahara Sea green. The dreamers believed much of the Sahara consisted of Wadis that lied below sea level and indeed were inland seas in earlier times. Though there are a few spots in the Sahara below sea level, connecting them so they can fill with sea water would have required much more work than a short canal. The notion of a Sahara Sea has not completely gone away but has moved. There is a proposed project to flood the Qattara Depression in Egypt with Mediterranean water brought to it by newly built canals.
I mentioned that the forgotten war was won militarily by the greatly outnumbered Spanish Foreign Legion supported by Franco’s Air Force and Navy. Pressure on Spain then turned to the United Nations where it was always easy to gin up anti colonial sentiment. Cape Juby was ceded in 1958, Ifni in 1969, and the Spanish Sahara in 1975.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the dreamers who imagine flooding a desert. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.