The Worldwide Phonecards Collectors Club is proud to announce its official partnership with the African Telately Association (ATA), one of the most enduring and consistently active phonecard collectors clubs in the world. Formalised by a unanimous vote of the ATA Executive Committee, this partnership connects two organisations that share the same conviction: that the future of phonecard collecting is built through collaboration, not isolation.
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A Partnership Confirmed by Unanimous Vote
The confirmation came from Warwick Stobrawe, President of the African Telately Association, speaking on behalf of an Executive Committee that voted unanimously in favour of the agreement. Unanimous votes carry weight. They signal not just approval but alignment: that everyone at the table understands what is being committed to and why it matters.
The Worldwide Phonecards Collectors Club was founded in March 2024 with a specific goal: not to replicate what already exists in the world of phonecard collecting, but to connect it. Clubs and associations have been working across every continent for decades. Much of that work has remained invisible beyond local networks, not for lack of quality but for lack of a platform. The WPC Club’s role is to provide that platform and to give the work of organisations like ATA the international reach it deserves.
The WPC Club has now established formal partnerships with the Phonecard Museum in Australia, the Museo Telefonia Pubblica in Italy, and the African Telately Association in South Africa. Each partnership operates on the same principle: mutual visibility, shared commitment to the hobby, and no compromise of either party’s independence. Together, they are building the international network that phonecard collecting has needed for some time.
Thirty Years of Uninterrupted Dedication
The African Telately Association was founded in South Africa in the mid-1990s by a small group of collectors who believed the hobby deserved a home, a structure, and a community. More than thirty years later, that structure is still standing and still meeting every month, a record that very few collector organisations anywhere in the world can claim.
What makes ATA remarkable is not just its longevity but the consistency of its commitment. Every first Sunday of the month, the club brings its members together in Pretoria for meetings that blend conversation, collecting, trading, and friendship. These gatherings are the heartbeat of the club: a place where knowledge passes between generations, where new collectors receive a genuine welcome, and where the value of what has been built over decades is renewed in person, month after month, year after year.
This continuity matters. In a collecting hobby that has faced real pressure from changing technology and a shifting active base in some markets, a club that has maintained unbroken activity since the 1990s is not simply a survivor. It is evidence that the passion for phonecard collecting does not disappear when conditions become difficult. It endures when it is given the right community to sustain it.
For a complete account of ATA’s founding, its key milestones, and the collectors who shaped its history over three decades, read our dedicated article: Celebrating 30 Years of the African Telately Association (ATA).
The African Telatelist: 337 Issues and Counting
Since 1998, ATA has published The African Telatelist every month without exception. Now in its 336th consecutive issue, the newsletter is one of the most consistent publishing records in the world of phonecard collecting. Each edition brings members articles on the hobby, news from the collecting world, reports on competitions and events, and notices for the association’s postal auctions.
Those postal auctions deserve particular attention. Running alongside every newsletter issue, they give collectors across South Africa and beyond a regular, structured opportunity to expand their collections and discover phonecards from countries they would never encounter through local trading alone. A single postal auction from ATA can feature cards from a dozen different countries across four continents, and that diversity tells you something important about the curiosity and the international reach of the South African collecting community.
337 consecutive issues is not just a record. It is a decision renewed every single month for nearly thirty years: to keep this community informed, active, and connected regardless of what else is happening around it. That kind of consistency is rare in any voluntary association. In a specialised collecting hobby, it is extraordinary.
Phonecards from Africa: An Underexplored Corner of the Hobby
Africa remains one of the most underrepresented continents in international phonecard collecting circles, not because its cards lack interest but because the networks that connect African collectors to the wider world have historically been limited. Countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and Southern Africa issued phonecards from the late 1980s onward, through state telecoms and independent operators. Many of those cards are genuinely rare outside their country of origin and genuinely common within regional trading networks that international collectors have rarely had direct access to.
ATA’s postal auctions are a window into this world. They regularly feature South African phonecards alongside cards from neighbouring countries, items that rarely surface in European or North American auction houses. For collectors who have focused primarily on European or Asian issues, ATA’s network offers access to a corner of the hobby that is both overlooked and rewarding to explore.
The WPC Club’s partnership with ATA is, among other things, a bridge into that world. It brings African phonecard collecting into the same international conversation as collecting traditions from Europe, Oceania, and the Americas, and it gives collectors everywhere a genuine point of contact with a community that has been documenting and trading these cards for three decades.
A Friendship Before a Partnership
Formal agreements confirm what human relationships have already established. Seven WPC Club members, including the club’s president, are also international members of ATA. This partnership did not begin on paper. It began through years of shared enthusiasm, mutual respect, and the kind of trust that forms between collectors who speak the same language regardless of the distance between them.
Warwick Stobrawe has attended the Phonecards International Meeting (PIM) in Grugliasco, bringing the South African collecting perspective into direct contact with the international community that gathers at PIM each April. That presence was itself a statement: not a formal commitment but a demonstration that the people behind ATA and the people behind the WPC Club are motivated by the same things. The pleasure of finding a card they did not expect. The interest in the stories those cards carry. The conviction that this hobby is worth preserving carefully, seriously, and with respect for everyone who has contributed to it.
When Warwick Stobrawe confirmed the partnership, his reasoning was direct. The phonecard collecting market is changing. Clubs around the world face the same challenges. Isolation is not the answer.
What This Partnership Unlocks
This partnership creates a genuine connection in both directions. ATA’s identity, history, and activities will be featured on the WPC Club website and across its social media channels, giving the association the international visibility that its thirty-year record has long earned. In return, the WPC Club will appear in The African Telatelist, reaching ATA’s network of collectors in South Africa and beyond.
In practical terms: a collector in Italy, Australia, or Japan can now discover the depth and specificity of South African phonecard collecting through the WPC Club website. An ATA member in Pretoria has a direct link to a worldwide network of 115+ collectors from 30+ countries across five continents. Thirty years of ATA history, documented month by month across 337 newsletter issues, now has a digital home that extends well beyond South Africa’s borders.
The terms of the agreement are deliberately simple. No financial compensation flows in either direction. Each organisation retains full ownership of its identity, its content, and its independence. What they exchange is something more durable: visibility, connection, and a shared commitment to the future of the hobby they both serve. The ATA partnership also marks the first formal link between the WPC Club and the African collecting community. It will not be the last.
An Open Door for the Global Collecting Community
The WPC Club’s ambition has always been clear: to become the international reference point for phonecard collecting, connecting not just individual collectors but the clubs, associations, and institutions that have kept this hobby alive across generations.
The partnership with ATA is one expression of that ambition. It is also a model. It costs nothing to join this network. It requires no transfer of resources and no compromise of identity. What it requires is a genuine belief in the future of phonecard collecting and a willingness to connect with others who share it.
To every collectors club or association around the world: the door is open. Whether a club has been active for thirty years or three, whether it has ten members or three hundred, if it believes in the future of this hobby, write to us at [email protected].
Welcome to the WPC Club family, ATA. Thirty years of dedication deserve to be celebrated, and celebrated widely.
