10 Birr Arms with plough, Red sides

Ethiopia's 1977 banknote series was issued under the Derg military government, which had deposed Haile Selassie in 1974 and was in the process of dismantling the imperial monetary identity — hence the replacement of the emperor's portrait with national emblems and agricultural imagery. The decision to retain Thomas De La Rue as printer despite the regime's Marxist-Leninist orientation was purely pragmatic; no domestic printing capacity existed, and Soviet-bloc alternatives were not yet in play.

P#32 is the first 10 Birr issue under the new republic. The watermark is a simple repeated pattern, consistent with De La Rue's economical security specification for lower-denomination African contracts of this period.