1000 Shillings John Paul II, bronze

Issued the year John Paul II turned 83 and was visibly declining in health, this piece belongs to a wave of Ugandan commemoratives produced almost entirely for the collector export market — Uganda had no meaningful connection to the papacy beyond the 1964 canonization of the Uganda Martyrs, twenty-two Catholics executed by Kabaka Mwanga II in 1886.

The silver plating on bronze flans of this type is notoriously thin, and surviving examples frequently show copper bleed at the high points and rim edges.