Two hundred years before Kuwait had a post office, it had post. The first letter to leave it is dated 1750, and the first national office opened in 1958. Between those dates lie camels, a British agent, and stamps bearing the portrait of a king who was not ours.
A fugitive’s letter
The researcher Slot records in his documentary work The Origins of Kuwait that the Dutch East India Company’s representative in Basra, one Kanter, sent the first documented letter from Kuwait on 4 March 1750 after fleeing Basra for it. The letter, besides being the first post, establishes that Kuwait was an independent emirate in the eighteenth century.
The Desert Express
In the reign of Sheikh Abdullah bin Sabah I, Kuwait’s second ruler, the government appointed postal couriers to carry letters between Kuwait and Basra, and then from Kuwait to the Levant on camelback. The name given to that route was the “Desert Express”.
And “express” here is by the measure of its time: the journey from Kuwait to Aleppo took fourteen to twenty days, and from Aleppo ships carried the letters to Europe through the port of Latakia.
The first recorded postal journey from Kuwait to Aleppo was on 15 July 1775. Lorimer says in his Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, published in 1915, that the recorded history of British-Kuwaiti relations begins from that year, when English post started being sent from Kuwait instead of Zubair.
Four years when Kuwait was the postal hub
Between 1775 and 1779, during the war between the Ottoman state and Persia which had occupied Basra, Kuwait became the British postal hub in the region. Goods and post arriving from India were shipped from here by camel to Aleppo, and then by ship to Europe. Four years, until the occupation of Basra ended.
An office Mubarak asked for
In 1901 Sheikh Mubarak Al-Sabah asked the British government to open a post office in Kuwait, undertaking in return not to permit any other state to open one like it.
The answer did not come quickly. Britain agreed on 19 February 1904 and decided to attach the post office to the office of its political agent in Kuwait, and Sheikh Mubarak accepted that on 28 February 1904. Three years between the request and the approval.
Three nicknames that became names
The first Kuwaitis began working at the Indian post office in 1919 as postmen, then rose until some reached senior administrative posts. Among the earliest:
Jassem Abdal, known as Jassem Al-Bosta, “Jassem the Post”. Khalaf Hussein, known as Khalaf Al-Teleji, “Khalaf the Telegraph”. And Hamad Al-Humaidi, known as Hamad Al-Teel, “Hamad the Wire”, who repaired the telegraph lines between Kuwait City and Basra.
Stamps in Kuwait’s name with an English king’s face
On 1 April 1923 the first set of Indian stamps overprinted with Kuwait’s name was issued: fourteen stamps, from half an anna to ten rupees, bearing the portrait of King George V. And in 1939 a similar set was issued with George VI.
The Indian post went on running Kuwait’s postal affairs until India’s independence in 1947, then Pakistan took over the administration for a few months, and it then passed to the British post.
1 February 1958
On that day the first national post office opened in Kuwait, at a ceremony attended by Sheikh Fahad Al-Salem Al-Sabah, who was appointed head of the department of post and telephone.
On the same date a set of stamps was issued bearing the portrait of Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem, in denominations of 5, 10 and 40 naya paisa — the Indian currency then circulating in Kuwait. The stamps had become Kuwaiti; the currency printed on them had not yet.
Source: a Kuwait News Agency report drawing on the book Milestones in the History of the Kuwaiti Post by the researcher and historian Mohammed Jamal, published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters.
Photo: a four-fils Kuwaiti constitution stamp, 1963 issue, with a postmark. From the editor’s own collection.
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