Colonial powers

This is the second time I've received mail - and stamps - from Joao in Portugal. This time he included stamps from previous Portuguese colonies: Angola and Mozambique. To me the stamps all were very thematic. They featured uniforms worn by the colonizing soldiers, raw materials that were extracted from those places, native women, maps of the conquered lands and portraits of the distinguished explorers etc involved.

It's amazing how many countries have been involved in the colonizing process. I'm not going to single any one out. Holland, my parents' country has dabbled. New Zealand, where I was born, was itself a colony. I recommend that you listen to a podcast by Dan Carlin on the topic.

Mad on Madagascar

The very first person to contact me through my Stamp Paradise ad was Linda Salzman from South Africa (actually she lives in Mozambique in a remote area, but her mail reaches her from S.A., taking up to two or three months!).

Linda and I became friends through a long exchange of emails. It took us an enjoyable age, deciding what to send one another. Linda sent me scans of her duplicates, and also of the varieties of earlier South African stamps, which was very educational, but after discovering that I actually had several envelopes full of stamps from that part of the world I chose mainly German stamps plus Mozambique and Madagascar.

Both of us prefer older stamps. Linda sent me her list of pre-1980 New Zealand stamps, and I was able to work through it and add 100 to that total. I look forward to further exchanges between the two of us.