Help With Nigeria, Please

Where was this Nigerian stamp canceled? I can read "AFAGHAI... K..."
in the cancel, but after looking through hundreds of place names in my sources I can't find that. Maybe that H is really an R?
My thanks in advance if you can help me with this puzzler.

What a strange cancel! It looks like NIGERI or NIGERA. Also, compare the two Gs. Totally different.

Hmmmmmm. Good spotting And two very interesesting questions.
BTW, taking a closer look at the second partial cancel at bottom of my illustration, I'd bet that the place of cancel is "AFAGHAI (space?)K...."
..which I've not been able to look up anywhere.

I think I see spacing between words. So perhaps AF AGHAI (K?)... where AGHAI is an actual surname. Nobody found with those exact initials on Google.

By the position of the last A, it's obviously a very long location header.

With your interpretation,
the only Afagha available is
AFAGHA OBIO ENWANG (Akwa Ibom region.)

The 4th letter is the curly one.

The only other AFAG?? can be AFAGBA (Kogi region)

There was a "Afagha" (District in the Annang province which is also the ethnic name in the south of nigeria).Today if may just be Afaha. "Ikot" is a prefix for lots of other villages.Lots of clan names dominate the spellings of small villages.
Which village it is in that postmark will take some time to find out...

https://books.google.fr/books?id=P5...ikot&f=false
https://worldpostalcode.com/nigeria...m/afaha-clan

Yes, my references were "Towns" not villages.
Interesting to know if villages had postal hammers.

I'm confused more about the bottom part of the cancel. The G of NIGER(IA?) is on the vertical centerline, making the word asymmetrical. (The whole A F AGHAI K...A is off-centered, too.) I just can't tell what comes after the R. It looks a bit like A, but much narrower than the others. Also, there is a state in Nigeria called Niger, for what it's worth.

edit: I'm assuming cancels are always made to be symmetrical and spelled correctly. Maybe that's not true.

Here are cancels with name of the country.
Eesti(Estonia) Latvija(Latvia)

vayoline, thank you for the images. I've edited my post to remove a most embarrassing misstatement.

Local and Community postal services in Nigeria.
I would not be surprised if a local craftsman made the cancel hammer.Given the poor quality of the letters.The stamp is from the 1960's.

http://www.nipost.gov.ng/Post_Office_Structure

It's a real puzzler! Maybe I can only hope for someday finding an example of this cancel in its entirety. But it could be a place whose spelling has changed, as suggested above, or a place that no longer exists or a case of misspelling.
Anybody know of an organization devoted to Nigerian or West African philately? Maybe someone there can help.
In any case, all the replies to my original query are greatly appreciated and are further proof of the camaraderie of stamp collectors.

How about now it's AFAHA IKOT EBAK and that A way over at the end of the header is the last letter of the its region/district/locality?

There is an organisation that specialises in West African philately - it is called the West Africa Study Circle.

Its website may be found at www.wasc.org.uk

One of our members, Paul Redhead, has his own website devoted to Nigerian cancels

www.nigerian-post-offices.org.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.nigerian-post-offices.org.uk/

From Paul's lists, the postmark in question is Afagha Ikot Ebak. It is recorded up until 1967 and the Nigera spelling mistake is also documented.

Hope this helps

Phil

Great !
(and welcome to the forum)

Hi Phil,

Welcome and thanks very much for sharing this resource.

http://www.nigerian-post-offices.org.uk/