As it turned out, Mozambique Company met few of its
obligations but it did conscript labor and raise taxes -- main sources of
corporate income. It rapidly became a forced labor regime aimed at plundering
the region. Although the slave trade had been formally abolished, the Company transformed
its prerogatives to corporate form of slavery, violently when it deemed
necessary.(1) It even sent conscripts to work in South African mines. “To
minimize expenses the directorship kept salaries of local European employees
low, expecting them to supplement their wages by pillaging the local population.”(2)
Many outraged Africans fled the areas under Company
control or, not surprisingly, rebelled against this new form of slavery. Portugal
twice sent in the military to quieten matters.
The Company’s main center for administrative control
was located in the port city of Beira where it established a postal service that
issued stamps and a bank that issued currency.
From 1892 until 1918 the Company used standard Portuguese
stamps overprinted or inscribed “Companhia de Moçambique.” The earliest of
these, if found in feeder albums, are sometimes reprints. Of the seven showing
on the supplement pages (below), I believe to top two to be smooth surfaced reprints
and the five others to be originals with chalky surfaces. Reprints command
higher prices.
Beginning in 1918, the Company issued its own stamps that
were designed and printed by Waterlow and Sons, Ltd., a British Company. These
stamps show happy Africans tending prosperous plantations, modern transport,
and thriving wildlife -- images not remotely consistent the realities described
above. However, stamp collectors throughout the world enthusiastically filled
their album spaces with these attractive stamps, thereby unintentionally providing
the Company with a considerable source of income and a public relations triumph.
Many of us, my childhood self included, were transfixed by the beauty of these
stamps.
Essays for the first Waterlow stamps appear at the end
of the supplement pages. They are colored differently from the stamps that were
actually issued. They have the “specimen” overprints and the values punched
out.
The Company’s philatelic public relations gambits
continued. In 1939 seven stamps were overprinted to commemorate a visit from
the Portuguese president -- appealing triangles with animals and ships. At the
time, the President must have been impressed with what he saw because he
awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the Colonial Empire to the Company.
Census: 122 in BB spaces, 145 on
supplement pages.
(1) The Mozambique Company’s brutality is detailed in Eric Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). His data come from previously unavailable Company records and interviews with survivors.
(2) Allen
Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique: From Colonialism To Revolution,
1900-1982 (Avalon Publishing,1983).
Mozambique Company charity stamps seem contradictory to my foregoing comments, so I put them at end of this post surrounded in black.
And produce they did, with some 275 stamps issued between 1892-1941. But not just any stamps- you know, the usual uninspired Portuguese colony fare- but bi-colored pictorials engraved in London beginning with the 1918 issue forward.
Wow!...as poor as their administration of the colony was, their stamps are magnificent- and cheap for WW classical collectors to own.
