At a meeting of the RPSV in April, Paul Peggie gave a talk and displayed over 60 items of early Northern Rhodesian missionary mail. The following two cards were part of that display:
The card above (HG 6; up rated to 3½d; the foreign rate to Europe was 2½d, possibly the extra 1d was for the mission having to pay for all canoe transportation on the Zambesi River), was from the mission at Nalolo (Barotseland) and dated 28th June, 1899. No other postcard has been recorded that shows the pre 1900 rate of 2½d from North Western Rhodesia.
The Barotse mail left Lealui on the monthly mail run south, collected this card at Nalolo and travelled 220 miles to Shesheke. A further 50 miles were travelled to a ford on the Zambesi at Kazangula, where the mail was exchanged with Bechuanaland Protectorate runners for the 300 mile journey to Bulawayo (19th August, 1899). It then travelled by rail to Cape Town, sea to Europe, arriving in Tours, France on 2nd September, 1899. The card is written by Georges Mercier (it has his own personal stamp in violet), an artisan with the Paris Missionary Society. The correspondence, in French, is largely of a personal nature including the comment: “I have not had a serious attack of the fever…”
The next card (above) – HG 5 – is also from Nalolo and is dated 16th December, 1900 and is written by Madame E. Beguin, wife of the Reverend Eugene Beguin of the Paris Missionary Society. It states ‘inter alia’:
“We are growing more and more anxious, given that our supplies aren’t arriving. This, added to other worries, has become a cause for great anxiety. A new death, you see, afflicts the mission. Mr. Mercier seemed to be indispensable and now he is returned to God. And the disease continues to weigh on us. What a year when these heavy images do not go away.”
Bibliography.
E.B. Proud, Postal History of Northern Rhodesia.
Richard Sampson, They Came To Northern Rhodesia
The Journal of the Rhodesian Study Circle (various)
Most interesting!