Month: September 2026

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Kenya, Uganda, & Tanzania 1975, Looking forward to FESTAC 77, to get Negritude going again

If we can just get free of colonialism the innate negritude can finally move us forward. Then colonialism ends and things only get worse. Maybe a Pan African festival open to Africans and the worldwide diaspora can bring back that hope once shared. 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.

Remember this stamp was designed by Africans to show their culture to other blacks. The head on the left is a reproduction of the ivory mask depicting Queen Mother Idia of the 16th Century Empire of Benin. This was to be the symbol of the festival. The right side picture might be a little disturbing to non African eyes. It shows Masai warriors bleeding a cow. This was not done to kill the cow but instead to drain blood. The Masai believe drinking fresh cow blood everyday or part of ceremonies is good for health, boosts the immune system, and is a good cure for hangovers. A group holds down the cow, the jugular vein is nicked and the blood is caught in a pot. When the pot is full the wound is caked over with mud and the cow lives on.

Todays stamp is issue A75, a 50 cent stamp issued by Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania on November 3rd, 1975. The three countries were in their last year of a postal service union left over from British colonial days. The stamp imagines that the FESTAC festival was going to occur in January 1976 but there was another in a series of delays and the Festival did not happen till 1977. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

In colonial times there was a deep sense among African intellectuals that their achievements were being limited by the yoke of colonialism. When African country after country gained there freedom, there was a great sense of hope the was shared by the worldwide African diaspora. When the new countries instead declined due to their ineptitude their was a palpable sense of disappointment. A World Festival of Negro Arts was held in Dakar Senegal in 1966 to restore a sense of common purpose of Negritude as it was then referred. The Festival was not a success. Dakar was a giant ghetto and the Festival was embarrassingly paid for by France and UNESCO. Nigeria, with it’s oil wealth, was invited to hold the next one and pay for it themselves while hosting it in a newly built festival village that did not show old scars. The date was to be 1970.

The date repeatedly fell back all the way from 1970 to 1977 due to construction delays, the Nigerian Civil War, and government changes. During that time the name was modernized to Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, or FESTAC 77. A new village was constructed with 10,000 permanent homes, and a cultural theatre modeled on the Palace of Culture and Sports in Varna, Bulgaria. Over 2000 buses were imported to take the 16,000 participants to events that were cultural and intellectual. Participants came from Africa, the USA, Brazil, Guyana, and the Afro Caribbean. There was an opening ceremony that featured men walking on stilts and dancers with flaming urns on their heads. On the whole, the Festival was a success but the spirit did not sustain a rebirth of African momentum.

Homes built for FESTAC looking a little worse for wear today

There was one further Festival back in Dakar in 2010. The name was again updated to Word African Arts Festival. The theme was a hoped for African Renaissance. It was plagued by all the old 1966 problems and embarrassments. Funding was again by France and UNESCO.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast those that try to maintain progress. It will be my last. I don’t want a hangover and have to try a traditional African cure. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2019.

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Falkland Island Dependencies 1946, How Britain suddenly itself becomes dependant during manefestations of Herr Graf Spee

War between major powers often takes place in some far off places. An otherwise costly, lonely outpost can become suddenly important when you add the presence of the enemy. 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.

This is the first stamp issue of the Falkland Island Dependencies. So why not inform the collector where you are talking about with a map. The stamp looks nice but I can’t make much out on the map. The stamp designers saw this themselves and redrew the stamp two years later but it is hard to get around that the south Atlantic ocean is large and the tiny outposts spread out.

Todays stamp is issue A1, a half penny stamp issued by the Dependencies of the British Crown Colony of the Falkland Islands. It was an eight stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.10 unused. The half penny denomination, quite the bargain, would have only been useful for inter-outpost mail, so the stamp being used triples the value. I mentioned the stamp was redrawn and that change ups their value 8 fold.

The Falkland Islands dependencies was the arrangement where by the Falkland Island colony administration took responsibility for other British outposts including South Georgia island, the South Sandwich Islands, South Orkney Islands, the South Shetland Islands, and British outposts on Antarctica. The Antarctic territories separated in 1962, see https://the-philatelist.com/2019/06/10/british-antarctic-territory-1963-with-no-more-shackleton-we-better-make-bases-permanent/ , and left only  South Georgia and South Sandwich as Falkland Dependencies. In 1985 the Dependencies became a separate overseas territory of Britain, which they remain. The islands were free to do there own stamps, we covered a South Georgia stamp here https://the-philatelist.com/2019/06/14/south-georgia-at-least-the-norwegians-immigrants-brought-reindeer-to-this-british-island/  .

Maintaining British nationals in such far off outposts will always be expensive. The 20th century brought world wide wars among Great Powers and a base suddenly useful. In World War I the German Indian Ocean naval squadron was returning home by way of the south Atlantic under the command of Admiral and Graf Maximillian Spee. He decided to bombard the Falklands to deprive the British of their radio relay and coal station. A larger British naval squadron was looking for them and had stopped at Stanley to be refueled. Spee’s squadron was surprised and most of the ships were sunk, only two of the eight German ships escaped. Admiral and Graf Spee perished.

HMS Inflexible picking up survivors from the sunken German Cruiser Sharnhorst after the Battle of the Falklands.

At the onset of World War II, a German pocket Battleship, named in honor of the World War I Admiral, deployed to the south Atlantic to raid commercial ships. A pocket battleship was a faster and better armed cruiser built to get around Weimar restrictions on ship building. It was at the extremes of its range and had no prospect of rearming so was ordered to avoid all contact with even weaker enemy ships. A British cruiser squadron  was again waiting for them off Falkland and the Graff Spee decided to scuttle herself to save her crew rather than face them. Captain Ludendorf of the Graf Spee committed suicide, his body falling on the battle ensign of the Graff Spee.

After the war the foreign intrusions were by lessor powers. In 1966, an Argentine DC4 airliner was hijacked to Falkland by 19 members of a Peronist extremist group and the plane landed on a racecourse but hit power lines. First responders were taken hostage and the Argentines disembarked around the plane, raised Argentine flags and sung the Argentine national anthem. The local part time defense forces surrounded the racecourse and forced an Argentine surrender. I will leave the 1982 war with Argentina for another stamp.

Well my drink is empty and I guess the Falklands are safe with Germans no longer using the name Graf Spee on their ships and not hiring any descendants of the Graff. Their navy’s current frigates however do rather resemble pocket battleships. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2019.

 

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Exiled Yugoslavia 1943, remembers a Croatian/Bosnian/German? Bishop

A fake stamp may still be interesting. They can get quite convoluted. 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.

So this stamp issue started out as a recognized issue, albeit just barely. The stamp was issued with the aim of raising revenue by the Yugoslav Royal government in exile in London. At the bottom of the stamp you can see it was printed in London. The international community, excluding of course the Axis troops then occupying Yugoslavia, still recognized the Royal government as the legitimate representative of the people. So far so good, but the stamp collecting community requires a stamp to also be useful for postage and this stamp was unavailable at Yugoslav post offices. The London Embassy developed a work around. This stamp would be valid for postage no matter how many were printed because it could be used on Yugoslav Navy ships at sea. One submarine and two torpedo boats had escaped to Egypt during the 1941 invasion and very occasionally operated with their old crews under British command. A thin string of legitimacy. That string soon broke. In 1944 the Allies began recognizing the partisans under Tito as the legitimate government. They took over the London Embassy and it’s large stock of unsold copies of this stamp issue. It was not their type of issue and the issue was cancelled. Not however thrown away. In 1950, a 1945 victory overstamp was added to remaining stocks and sold off not for postal use to stamp dealers. This stamp is one of those, so fake.

That does not mean it is not an interesting issue as it recognizes people who the Communists would have mostly found unworthy. I have already covered another stamp from this issue here, https://the-philatelist.com/2018/07/30/communist-yugoslavia-1950-sells-off-the-invalid-exile-stamps/ . On todays stamp, we have a Bosnian Croat Catholic Bishop who became a political figure promoting Croatian nationalism. He is thus an odd figure for a Yugoslav government to be honoring. Especially at a time when Croatia was given independence by the German invaders and one of the first stamp issues of Croatia literally blots out King Peter II’s face. See https://the-philatelist.com/2019/09/20/croatia-1941-crossing-out-peter-ii-is-something-we-all-can-agree-on/ .

Bishop Joseph Strossmayer was born into a German family in the Croat area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He received Catholic clerical training in Belgrade, Budapest, and Vienna. He was ordained a priest in 1838. He was opposed to what he perceived as then Hungarian domination of Croats politically and served in the Croat Diet, a national assembly. Strossmayer was named Bishop of Diakovar in modern day Bosnia. He founded the wonderfully named Academy of South Slavs. Why don’t they still give out names like that?

As Bishop, Strossmayer ruffled a few feathers. At the Vatican Council he spoke out controversially in favor of Protestantism and reuniting the Catholic Church with the Eastern Orthadox Church. Even more controversially, perhaps even heretically, he spoke out against Papal infallibility and even Papal Primacy. He lost those fights at the Vatican Council and as Bishop was forced to yield “at least outwardly” as he put it, to the official position. He died in 1905.

Well my drink is empty and so I may pour another while I ponder why Bishop Strossmayer would be honored By Yugoslav Royalty. Were he alive, given his background, he would have probably gone along with a German influenced Croatia. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2019.