Some may have noted that my latest posts have introduced African stamps – a topic I have not written much earlier. The reason behind this wind of change is very simple (and fun): I’ve been on a “phila-safari” since late March while re-organizing my collection of African stamps.

The first and most noticeable thing (from my perspective) is that I’ve finally managed to order my stamp albums by color. And the color of Africa (and Middle East) stamp collection is Blue… I wish I would have done this move ages ago, as it looks much more nicer than a collection of odd colored stockbooks.

At the same time I also changed the order I kept countries in my stamp albums. Whereas my old system was a mixture of this and that with very loose geographical connections, now the countries are organized mainly by language used on stamps / historical background. Ie. there are separate set of stockbooks for British Africa and descendants, another set for French Africa and descendants, and so on.

I must confess that this move created surprisingly lot of continuity on multiple levels.

One of those things I never before realized properly before was the “big picture” between cancelled-to-order vs. real used stamps in Africa, and the historical background / evolution link between these two. Now I think I got it…

During the colonial regime, almost all of the African stamps appear to have been used for real postage. When entering post-colonial era differences begin to appear. Many of the former British colonies continued issuing and using stamps for real postage (though there are exceptions such as Tanzania and Uganda), while several descendants of French and Portuguese colonies slipped away to publishing CTO-used stamps for decades (and once again there are exceptions like Tunisia) .

When approaching the 21st century, most African countries have become IMHO very respectable stamp issuers, and as such more interesting to even larger audience of stamp collectors. It was not long ago, that Gibbons Stamp Monthly touted that modern Africa has become one of the most interesting areas to collect with very strict issuing policy (and increasing price expectations), whereas Europe and other traditional countries suffer from flood of issues that exhausts collectors.

I’ve always liked stamps from Africa, but now I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be putting a whole lot more interest and time with them. LOL.

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