5000 Shillings Alexander von Humboldt

Somalia's mid-1990s commemorative program had little to do with Somalia. The country had no functioning central government following the collapse of the Barre regime in 1991, and these issues were produced entirely for the international collector market by outside licensing arrangements — the Somali name on the coin being largely nominal.

Humboldt spent five years, 1799–1804, traversing South America and New Spain, generating some 60,000 plant specimens and the foundational data for modern physical geography. His connection to any Somali issuing authority is nonexistent.