Catalog
50 Kwacha
| Issuer | Reserve Bank of Malawi |
|---|---|
| Year | 1997 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Intaglio portrait of John Chilembwe at right, facing three-quarters left, rendered against a multicolour guilloche underprint with vignettes of a fish and a fishing boat scene at centre-left. The teal header panel at top carries the issuer name and denomination numeral K50, with vertical lettering along the left margin. A Governor signature appears at lower left above the date, accompanied by the Reserve Bank of Malawi map logo in teal. |
|---|---|
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| Protection description | John Chilembwe portrait visible when held to light; embedded security thread running vertically through the note |
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| Comments |
The 1997 issue falls within Malawi's long-running De La Rue relationship, a dependency that stretched across the full post-independence period and reflected a common arrangement among former British territories with no domestic printing capacity. Thomas De La Rue had produced Malawi's notes since the Reserve Bank's founding issues of the late 1960s, and the 50 Kwacha denomination was introduced into the series as inflation gradually made lower values impractical for everyday transactions.
The security thread on this series is a basic metallic type, without the windowed or demetallized features that De La Rue introduced on higher-security commissions of the same period — a cost-driven specification decision that was common for smaller central bank clients.