10 Kwacha

The Reserve Bank of Malawi was established in 1964, the year of independence, but Malawi didn't introduce its own currency until 1971 — the kwacha replacing the Malawian pound at a rate of two kwacha to one pound. This note belongs to the series that carried the institution through its first decade of genuine monetary autonomy, a period when Thomas De La Rue supplied virtually every new African central bank that needed a credible printing house and didn't have one of its own.

The P#16 series ran across nearly a decade of issue dates, which means condition and specific date within that window matter considerably to value. Earlier dates in the run are generally scarcer.