Belgium Congo
Further to my other posts of Dad's album, here are the Belgium Congo stamps from that era.
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I have a soft spot for the stamps of the Belgian Congo. There is a good range of relatively ordinary postage stamps here. I recently sold a lot of loose Belgian Congo stamps at 20p (R4) each, a total of £15 worth (R300). These were mostly the older landscape stamps seen on your sheets. I daresay that they would have catalogued much more but stamps are only worth what collectors are willing to pay and, as I have said before, there are few new collectors for this sort of material now. Nevertheless, if I was collecting Belgian Congo stamps, which I am not, there are several here with good postmrks ELIZABETHVILLE, UKAFU and LIKASI that I would want. This is unfortunately the fate of sheets like these, the best items get picked off and the unwanted rest which may contain some good stamps, known as the 'remainders', are left to gather dust while waiting for a buyer, a philateic Godot, who never comes along.
The Belgian Congo had an awful colonial history, something that many Belgians deny, as evidenced by their museum in Brussels. I last visited it some 30 years ago and was horrified that it projected only the perceived Belgian Eurocentric benefits of colonialism, rather than balance these with the many negative cruelties and inhumanities that were introduced in order to make the Congo profitable. A more recent American visitor told me he was shocked at the Belgian's inability to grasp the extent of their colonial culpability for crimes against humanity. The Belgians have much to explain for the betterment of historical understanding, not least how and why they are so defensive today! If you want to know a bit more about what King Leopold did to get his personal equatorial African fiefdom producing rubber, read 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild. It is a very good into to Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness".