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5 Shillings - Elizabeth II
| Issuer | East African Currency Board |
|---|---|
| Year | 1953-1957 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Intaglio-printed in blue-black on an orange-brown underprint with guilloche patterning throughout. A portrait vignette of Queen Elizabeth II is positioned at the lower right. The denomination is inscribed in three scripts — English, Arabic, and Gujarati — reflecting the multilingual character of the currency area. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | A central vignette of a lion passant occupies the middle ground against a plain field, flanked on both lateral margins by the denomination in numerals. The value in numerals also appears in each corner, while the denomination in words is set in a panel along the top and bottom margins. |
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| Comments |
The East African Currency Board was a colonial monetary authority serving Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar under a single shared currency — an arrangement that persisted until each territory's independence dismantled the framework in the early 1960s. This note falls within the first Elizabeth II series, which replaced the George VI issues following the 1952 accession.
Thomas De La Rue's involvement with East African currency ran continuously for decades, and the P#33 represents one of the lower-denomination workhorses of the series — heavily circulated, frequently damaged by tropical humidity, and consequently scarce in anything above Fine.