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<iain.walker@anthro.ox.ac.uk> Many countries issue stamps purely for the collector's market and Tanzania is one of them. It is far from being the worst offender, however - when I was a child Ajman was particularly notorious for its large, gaudy (and worthless) stamps portraying Botticellis, steam engines, dogs, etc. For a period in the late 1990s, stamps issues for the Comoro Islands were handled by (I think) an American company who printed anything they liked - and hundreds of stamps were issued featuring pretty much anything from hot air balloons to Betty Boop. They would send a sheet or two to Moroni - as long as a token number were available for sale in the post office in the country of issue, then they counted as legal issues. Philatelists curse them. So there is not _necessarily_ any significance in the portrayal of a Crimean war soldier on a Tanzanian stamp. Iain Walker. -- Dr. Iain Walker ESRC Research Fellow COMPAS University of Oxford 58 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6QS
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