Pen Gun Owned by Freedom Fighter Set for NFT Sale in South Africa

(Bloomberg) --

A pen gun owned by late South African freedom fighter Oliver Tambo is set to be auctioned as a non-fungible token to raise funds for a heritage site that documents the nation’s struggle for democracy. 

Tambo led the African National Congress for almost a quarter century from 1967, during which he lived in exile and the party was outlawed for opposing South Africa’s Whites-only apartheid government. He earlier helped found the ANC Youth League with Nelson Mandela and others, and helped coordinate the party’s guerrilla campaigns. 

The pen gun is thought to have been given to Tambo by East Germany in the mid-1980s and was possibly developed by its secret police, commonly known as the Stasi, according to research by Liliesleaf, a South African heritage body.

 “Though the Pen Gun could not kill, it would badly injure a would-be assassin,” said Virtual Nation Builders, a blockchain company that tokenized the weapon. 

The NFT is set to be auctioned on Nov. 11, with a starting price of $5,000, South African NFT exchange Momint’s website shows. Proceeds from the sale will go toward trying to re-open the Liliesleaf Heritage Site, whose finances have been hard hit-by restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. 

NFTs have soared in popularity in recent months, with caricatures of monkeys and lions commanding prices in the millions of dollars. Sports clubs, prestige automakers and even pop stars are among those getting into the nascent trading business, which uses blockchain technology to authenticate unique ownership tokens attached to otherwise easily reproducible digital goods. Music, photography and digital art are among the popularly traded genres of NFTs.

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