WASC promotes study of the stamps and postal history of West Africa and the Atlantic Islands, including the development of the mails to, from and within West Africa up to the present day.

Main areas covered include Ascension / Tristan da Cunha, Cameroons, The Gambia, Gold Coast / Ghana, Nigeria and its constituent territories, St Helena, Sierra Leone and Togo. Other areas include: British Postal Agencies on Madeira, Tenerife. St Vincent (Cape Verde Islands) and Fernando Po.

Members' interests, displays / presentations and publications include material linked to other territories in West Africa, especially where that relates to international airmail and surface routes, military campaigns, censorship and maritime mail.

From these links, you will find brief introductions to: Ascension Tristan da Cunha / Gough Is Cameroons The Gambia Gold Coast / Ghana Nigeria St Helena Sierra Leone Togo

In June 2024 we added over 1000 files on Nigerian postal history from the archive of the late Ray Harris. In January 2024 we added a number of monographs relating to The Gambia, The Gold Coast, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. We have also added a page linking to hundreds of scans of early Togo material from John Mayne's collection,

Cameo is WASC's award-winning journal.

 

For information about WASC membership, officers, constitution, and data privacy visit our membership page

The 2025 WASC biennial week-end Conference takes place
from Friday 26 September to Sunday 28 September
at the Holiday Inn, Kenilworth.
Contact us (webmanager@wasc.org.uk) for details

Our Zoom on-line meetings in 2025 will take place on Saturdays: 31 May, 13 September, 29 November, all with a 7pm start. Details of displays and instructions for joining the Zoom call will be emailed to WASC members in due course. Previous WASC Members' Zoom displays are online here.

Issues of Cameo previous to the latest five years have been digitised. All issues from number 1 (January 1975) to number 110 (June 2020) are freely available on this website. Click the CAMEO button in the top menu.

The Cameo Index volumes 1 to 25 covers all issues up to the end of 2024. It is organised alphabetically by administration, and available as an Excel file which may be downloaded and searched by topic, country or author.

Our "Additional Documents" page has papers under sectional headings. Under Maritime Documents is a group of Elder Dempster sailing timetables, together with maps beautifully drawn by Peter Wingent (a sample map can be seen there). Some other documents produced by members on, for example, RAF West Africa-Rabat, Civil Aviation, Nigerian postmarks, are reached by links from the "Additional Documents" page. Visit that page also for a link to a free update to "Ghana Postal Markings to 1957" by Ian Anderson and Philip Quirk

If you wish to contact the Study Circle for information which does not appear on the site, please use this email address (remove spaces): webmanager @ wasc. org. uk