Anjouan is part of the Comoro Islands group which are a small group of islands between Madagascar and Africa. The islands were long a French dependency and for a brief period around the turn of the last century issued their own postage stamps. The stamps are part of the design called the Peace and Commerce set and they are the same for scores of French Colonies. The Peace and Commerce sets are long definitive sets in which the name of the colony imprinted in a tablet is the only difference between the sets. Anjouani postage stamps served little postal purpose and were largely available from the French philatelic agency in Paris. Anjouan briefly made news a few years ago when there was a small revolution there. The island had briefly declared independence from the Comoros of which it had been a part, and had used its independence to sell the right to incorporate some shady offshore banks. Anjouan is one of those areas that few people have heard of and which even fewer would have heard of if not for postage stamps. After 1910 for ninety years Anjouan was administered as part of the Comoro Islands but then a revolution of 1998 gave the island independence. The rebel government was overthrown by the Comoros in 2008 and now Comoro Island stamps are used there.
