20 Escudos Serpa Pinto

Banco Nacional Ultramarino issued this note for Mozambique during the final years of Portuguese colonial administration, a period when the Estado Novo regime under Caetano was already under severe pressure from FRELIMO's guerrilla campaign in the north. The series naming Serpa Pinto — the nineteenth-century explorer and military officer who controversially forced treaties on Barotseland in 1888, nearly triggering war with Britain — carried obvious political freight for a colonial administration trying to reassert Portuguese historical legitimacy.

Bradbury, Wilkinson printed the series in Surrey, a standard arrangement for BNU issues of this period. Within two years of this note's issue date, the Carnation Revolution had ended the Estado Novo, and Mozambican independence followed in 1975.