Tuesday/ written in 1895 🖋

I don’t collect whole pieces of mail (such as envelopes, first day covers and post cards), but I found this post card that was for sale on Ebay impossible to resist.

This post card (‘Briefkaart’) is Afrikaans only and doesn’t bother to offer English wording (later ones were bilingual, and did). Check out the gorgeous cursive writing, an art form lost in the century that followed.
The card was mailed in 1895, in Johannesburg, City of Gold, ‘El Dorado’ for real— founded only nine years prior, in 1886. (In that year the Witwatersrand Gold Rush started, which led to the establishment of Johannesburg). 
Just a few years earlier still, the outcome of the First Boer War (1880-81) had led to the temporary independence of the South African Republic (‘Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek’) from the British Empire.

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