Tchad, 1922, “collected one by one”.
before Chad had a flag it chose, before it had borders it drew, before it had a currency it controlled..
it got a stamp, a tiny rectangle of paper, issued by whoever was in charge, carrying the name of a place that didn't ask to be named that way.
i. the country that almost wasn't
Chad sits in the dead center of Africa, no coastline. no easy access. no obvious resource to extract quickly.
the French called it "le cœur mort de l'Afrique", the dead heart of Africa, not because it was empty, but because it was hard to reach, harder to control, and offered little of the immediate profit that drove colonial ambition.
and yet. France wanted it.
after defeating the region's sultan in 1900, France established military control over the territory. for the next two decades, Chad was reorganized, merged, separated, and redrawn on maps made in Paris, by people who had never once crossed the Sahara.
on March 17, 1920, France declared Chad a separate colony, the land hadn't changed, the people hadn't changed, only the paperwork had… but in the colonial world, paperwork was everything.
ii. the first stamps “borrowed identity”
post offices in Chad opened as early as 1905 in Fort-Lamy.
for years, mail moved using stamps from French Congo, then Ubangi-Shari, then Middle Congo, whoever's administration was in charge that season.
it took until November 1922, two full years after Chad became a colony, for it to receive stamps it could call its own.
they weren't made for Chad.
they were Middle Congo stamps, taken from existing stock, run back through the press, and stamped with a single word in bold black ink:
- eighteen values. 1 centime to 5 francs.
three designs, all of them rooted in the French colonial imagination of central Africa:
🧚🏿♀️a Bakalois woman ~ middle values
🥥 a coconut grove ~ high values
none of these images were Chadian.
they were recycled from the Middle Congo.
the only thing that made them Chadian was the ink.
that overprint is the entire colonial story told in one gesture.
someone else's paper. someone else's design.
just a new name pressed on top.
iii. 1924, “they added another layer”
two years later, the same stamps were overprinted again.
this time a second line appeared beneath TCHAD “AFRIQUE EQUATORIALE FRANÇAISE”
French Equatorial Africa. the colonial federation that swallowed Chad, Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Gabon whole, stretching from the Congo River to the edge of the Sahara.
two overprints, two names that weren't Chad's own, one tiny stamp.
the colonial administration wanted clarity on paper.
what they left behind was a record, the machinery of empire, made visible in miniature.
iv, the people who made them
two artists were behind the original Middle Congo designs later overprinted for Chad.
Jules-Jacques Puyplat, French engraver, whose fine intaglio work gave these stamps their remarkable sharpness. look closely at a well-preserved example and you can still feel the slightly raised ink under your fingertip.
Pawel Merwart, a Polish-born painter who spent years in the French colonial world. the Bakalois woman ~ the most iconic figure in this series, carries his influence. she has been reproduced hundreds of thousands of times. her name was never recorded.
v. what i think about when i look at this page
the leopard on the 1 centime stamp never walked on Chadian soil.
the coconut grove on the 5 franc stamp was a Middle Congo landscape.
the Bakalois woman was painted by a European, printed a hundred thousand times, and her name appears in no record anywhere.
and yet these stamps moved across Chad.
they sealed letters in Fort-Lamy.
they ended up here, in an album, in Morocco “collected one by one”, across years, placed carefully into a page that took a quite long time to fill.
the smallest things sometimes carry the longest histories.
