50 Escudos

Bradbury, Wilkinson produced this note for Portugal's colonial banking arm at a moment when Angola — the note's territory of issue — was being drawn more tightly into Lisbon's economic orbit. The Banco Nacional Ultramarino held the monopoly of issue across Portuguese Africa, and these mid-1940s denominations were part of a postwar reorientation of colonial currency infrastructure away from the more improvised wartime arrangements.

P#96A is distinguished from the otherwise similar P#96 by its signature combination — a detail that matters considerably for attribution and valuation, as the two varieties are frequently conflated in less careful listings.