Coins

The word “tickey” was a slang name given to the lowest denomination coin issued in silver for use in South Africa in pre-decimal times during the 1800s and 1900s. It was equal to three pennies and also called a threepence or thruppence. The last of these were struck in 1960 when South Africa’s coinage was decimalized. However, for the next four years, silver 2½ cent pieces, also called tickeys, were struck until 1964 when our second decimal coin series was introduced the next year. Thirty-three years later, in 1997, the tickey (2½ cent) was reintroduced by the South African Mint as a commemorative series struck for collectors.

The word “tickey” gained legendary numismatic status, even internationally, due to South African coins like the gold Sammy Marks tickey struck in the late 1800s and the Union of South Africa’s 1931 issue, both very scarce issues.    

Origin of the name

The Dictionary of South African English (DSAE) gives various possibilities where the word “tickey” came from, but it is clear that there is no consensus on this. Past writers suggested that it came from Portuguese pataca a colonial coin, or French patac ‘small coin’ (via the French Huguenots). Others suggest that the Malay word “tiga” (three) was its origin.

DSAE notes that both Xhosa and Zulu use itiki for the coin, described by lexicographers as being borrowed from South African English, but it is possible that itiki was in fact a rendering in the Nguni languages of a Dutch or...

South Africa has an exceptionally long coastline stretching over 3000 kilometers from the desert border with Namibia on the Atlantic coast southwards around the tip of Africa and then north to the border of subtropical Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. As would be expected, many a ship has foundered in our waters over the more than 500 years since the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeo Diaz first rounded the Cape in 1488. 

However, only a very few of these could be said to be true “treasure ships” carrying large amounts of coins struck in precious metals with examples like the Joanna (1682) and Merestein (1702) few and far between. And even these ships seldom carried large amounts of gold coins, unlike legendary ships sunk in foreign waters like the Nuestra Senora De Atocha and the SS Central America that foundered along the American coastline with the last mentioned carrying gold then valued (in 1857) at approximately US$8 000 000. The gold value today in South African currency would be approximately be R14.5 billion with the numismatic value much more.

Gold coins recovered from shipwrecks in South African waters were in most cases personal possessions carried by rich passengers and officers on the ships, although a ship like the Birkenhead (1852) was rumored to have had a military payroll of £240,000 in gold coins weighing about three tons on board. It is thought that the gold coins were intended as payment to soldiers fighting in the Eastern Cape boarder wars.

Two gold coins...

In part one of this two-part paper (click here to read), we mentioned an article written by G.F. Hill of the British Museum in The Classical Review in October 1897. It concerns an astonishing find made approximately four years earlier of ancient bronze Greek and Roman coins at Fort Grosvenor in Pondoland... “The site of what had once been a Bantu hut was being excavated in search of treasure, when, some ten feet below the surface, the diggers came upon a calabash which crumbled away in their hands”. Hill wrote that the coins ended up in the collection of Mr. Thomas Cook, a businessman from East Pondoland who was present during the excavation and could testify that they were all found together.

A researcher, J.F. Schofield of Durban commented in 1927 on the find and was of the opinion that the ancient coins fell into three distinctive groups, unlike Hill, who identifies two groups being Ptolemaic (305 to 204 BC) and Roman (296 -313 AD). Schofield says the third group consists of Byzantine coins, one being of the reign of John I, who ruled from 969 to 976 AD.

Raymond Dart (left) and Joseph L. Shellshear, c. 1921 (The Embryo Project Encyclopedia)

In part 1 we posed the...

Pondoland (Mpondoland) is a geographical area on the mid-east coast of South Africa (Indian Ocean side) and is part of what was previously known as the Transkei. It borders Thembuland, the area from which our former president, Nelson Mandela, hails. His second wife, Winnie Madikizela, was actually born in Pondoland.

Map showing Pondoland

Originally, the hunter-gatherer San and Khoihoi people inhabited the region in scattered nomadic groups for thousands of years. Around 500 AD, Xhosa speaking Ngunis settled in the area as a consequence of the indigenous population’s expansion to the south.

Contact with Europeans occurred when sailing ships from Europe began to circumnavigate Southern Africa. From the 1500s onwards, ships were wrecked on the Pondoland coast, resulting in some of the castaways permanently settling there and later being absorbed into Mpondo communities. For instance, when the Grosvenor, an East Indiaman, ran ashore on 4 August 1782, the survivors met up with a European girl named Bessie. She was the wife of Tshomane, the paramount chief of the Mpondo, who herself had been shipwrecked there 40 years earlier.

Oil painting...