1 Penny - Victoria Griqua Town Pattern

Griquatown — a settlement established by the London Missionary Society for the Griqua people in what is now the Northern Cape — never operated a mint and had no monetary authority of its own. This piece is a privately produced pattern, almost certainly commissioned in Britain, testing the concept of a local coinage that was never adopted. The Griqua had by 1890 been largely dispossessed of their land following the annexation of Griqualand West by the Cape Colony in 1880, which makes the political premise of this issue essentially fictional by the date it was struck.