10 'Pence' Griqua Town

The London Missionary Society issued these pieces not as currency in any conventional sense but as a practical solution to a barter economy at the Griqua Town mission station in the Northern Cape. Coinage simply did not reach that far into the interior, and the LMS needed a medium for local trade with the Griqua people. The addition of tin to the silver alloy was almost certainly a deliberate economy measure — bullion was difficult to source this far from Cape Town.

These are among the earliest coins struck for circulation in what is now South Africa, predating any government-sanctioned colonial coinage for the region by decades.