About this stamp
Gandhi and Mandela
India and South Africa issued this joint souvenir sheet of two stamps on 26 July 2018, a year that marked 25 years of their diplomatic relations, the 125th year of Mahatma Gandhi’s Pietermaritzburg station incident and the birth centenary of Nelson Mandela. India had been the first country to cut trade with the apartheid government, in 1946; relations were restored in November 1993.
Pietermaritzburg, 1893
On 7 June 1893 the young lawyer Gandhi, travelling from Durban to Pretoria on a first-class ticket, was ordered into the van compartment because of his colour. When he refused, he was put off the train at Pietermaritzburg and spent a bitterly cold night in the station waiting room. There he decided to stay in South Africa and fight racial discrimination, the beginning of Satyagraha.
Mandela
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 at Mvezo, Eastern Cape. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial, he was released on 11 February 1990 after 27 years, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk in 1993 and became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. India gave him the Bharat Ratna in 1990 and the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2001. He died on 5 December 2013.
On the Sheet
A ₹25 stamp with Gandhi and a ₹5 stamp with Mandela, both engraved-style portraits in round frames, set in front of a drawing of Pietermaritzburg station. The stamps were designed by Thea Clemons and Alan Ainslie of the South African Post Office and Nenu Gupta of India Post; 500,000 of each and 120,000 sheets were printed by wet offset at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.
The Stamps on This Sheet
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Nelson Mandela
For More Information
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