Scott #25 (Mozambique #68 with
overprint), King Carlos I, dark blue on rose
Bud's Big Blue
Bud's Observations
Colonization was an
expensive experiment. When European governments lacked the capital necessary to
finance their exploitive ambitions for Africa, they turned to private
investors, often merchants, to undertake the job. Then, when private financing
proved insufficient, handsome stamps were printed to pinch the pockets of young
philatelists worldwide. The stamps of Portugal’s northern Mozambique (aka,
Nyassa) illustrate the pattern.
Scott #31, black and orange
Kids prefer pictures of
exotic animals over royal portraiture – hence the menagerie found on stamps
issued by the Nyassa Company (1891-1929) and the Mozambique Company
(1891-1942).
Eagerly sought and
enthusiastically traded during my childhood, the Nyassa collection shown below
now suffers from neglect. No new stamps have been added to it for over 50
years. And I’m not shopping for more. Beloved in my childhood, they’re spurned
in my dotage.
Scott
# 38, black and yellow green
Why my indifference, if
not disdain, toward these stamps? It can be traced only in part to the fact
they were printed solely to extract profits from the buoyant philatelic market,
and not for any apparent postal need. There were fewer than 200 Europeans in
Nyassa in 1915 (1) and perhaps two million non-stamp using native Africans. How
much postage could the Europeans use? Further, I don’t resent the revenue
generated by sales to collectors. While considerable, it took only a small bite
out of the Nyassa Company’s red ink problems.
What repels me can be
summed up in one word – chibalo, the system of forced labor that the
Nyassa Company adopted when earlier plans failed to produce big profits. Imposed
against indigenous Africans by whipping and rape (2), chibalo was tantamount to slavery, although slavery had been formally
outlawed. Chibalo compelled black people to build roads with their bare
hands and to sweat blood on settler’s plantations in order to pay their never-ending
tax debts. The Company provided no clothing, no tools, and no food; pay was
meagre.
Moreover, the Company
levied parasitical “hut taxes” to ensure laborer’s long-term compliance and,
they hoped, docility. As the result, labor became abundant and lucrative,
allowing much of it to be sold to mining companies in South Africa and later in
Katanga and Belgian Congo. Chibalo continued long after the Company’s
demise (1929) and was a major grievance in the Mozambican wars for independence
(1964-1974).
Scott
# 122, black and green, zebra and huntsman
I visited Mozambique
some years after the independence wars ended. The scars of chibalo were
still apparent and painful. Mozambique has not recovered from the colonial
experiment, nor will I forget what I saw and heard there. Nyassa’s stamps
remind me. So, I buy them no more, no matter how pretty.
Jim's Observations
O.K., we will have the same old, same old, run of Portuguese colony stamps?
No!
By 1901, the Nyassa Company (or Niassa Company) arranged (with permission) for printing it's own designs by Waterlow and Sons in London. And the subsequent stamp issues are....magnificent!
But we have to be realistic- these stamps were intended for the philatelic market (Waterlow and Sons must have made a killing! ;-). Most of the printings of an issue were never sent to Nyassa.
Although tons of stamps were sold, ultimately, the Portuguese government was not impressed, and the concession was terminated in 1929. Mozambique stamps were then used.
And as Bud has so eloquently underlined with his essay above, the Company instituted a forced labor policy (chibalo system), which required the natives to work the plantations under horrendous conditions. The stamps have a stain on them.
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Supplements
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