20 Escudos

Angola's 1972 20 Escudos note arrived late in the Portuguese colonial monetary system, issued just two years before the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 upended Lisbon and set Angola's independence in motion. The Banco de Angola, though nominally a commercial bank with note-issuing privileges, operated entirely under Portuguese metropolitan authority — there was nothing locally autonomous about its monetary policy.

Thomas De La Rue's production for this series is competent but unremarkable by the firm's standards. The watermark remains the sole security feature, modest even by early-1970s conventions.