The Visual Rhetoric of Stamps: Rhodesia and the Projection of Sovereignty (1965-80) Outside of their practical purpose of paying for mail delivery, why should anyone care much about postage stamps? Outside of any connection to southern Africa, why should anyone care about the failed settler rebellion in Rhodesia? And who in God's name besides owlish collectors of colonial esoterica and dedicated philatelists should care about Rhodesian postage stamps in particular? This essay seeks to answer all three questions. As explained below, postage stamps are always important venues for state speech, and especially so in cases like Rhodesia, where many other communicative channels for state speech had been blocked. Rhodesia's enemies overseas cared a great deal about Rhodesian stamps, and their stamps were a matter of international concern at the highest levels of government. Rhodesia's friends abroad cared about Rhodesia's stamps, and these small stickers took on a great deal of significance during the rebellion as symbols and as pieces of evidence of the regime's contested statehood. Finally, as will be explained below, the fate of Rhodesia itself mattered to the outside world. The settler rebellion in Rhodesia was understood to be a defiant and dangerous countercurrent to the flow of African decolonization, and the regime's friends and enemies alike portrayed the fate of white settler-dominated Rhodesia as being of regional, continental, and world significance. So despite their diminutive size, Rhodesian stamps carried an outsized importance at the time and provide us today with a broader insight into white settler politics and ideologies in mid-century Africa. It is the aim of this chapter to link the philatelic practices of the Rhodesian regime, and the international reactions to Rhodesian postage stamps, to Rhodesia's wider settler project in its regional and global context, something no other study has set out to do. On November 11, 1965, Prime Minister Ian Smith declared that his white settler government in the British colony of Rhodesia was unilaterally breaking away from Britain and was from that moment forward a fully sovereign state within the British Empire with the Queen as its head of state. This act was referred to by most at the time and since as Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), although within British government circles it was referred to as Rhodesia's "I.D.I," Illegal Declaration of 1