[MSN] Ethiopia is demanding the remains of an emperor's. Along with him came so many looted treasures, including religious artefacts and 350 manuscripts, that it reportedly took 15 elephants and 200 mules to carry them from Magdala to the nearest sea port.

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Out of Africa: The stolen prince 
Ethiopia is demanding the remains of an emperor's son who was captured and
sent to Britain to be educated as a gentleman 
By Cahal Milmo and Emily Duggan 
Published: 18 June 2007 

Amid the gothic splendour of St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle there is a
little-noticed brass plaque. Erected in memory of Prince Alemayehu Tewodros,
it reads: "I was a stranger and ye took me in." 

The memorial plate and the skeletal remains that lie behind it are the only
concrete traces of the tragic and extraordinary tale of a seven-year-old boy
who became embroiled in what many believe was the greatest orgy of looting
conducted in the name of the British Empire.

The child prince, the son of the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II, who has a
claimed bloodline stretching back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,
was captured in April 1868 by the British Army, which conquered the ancient
citadel of Magdala.

Alemayehu, a royal orphan, was transported to England to be educated as a
gentleman. Along with him came so many looted treasures, including religious
artefacts and 350 manuscripts, that it reportedly took 15 elephants and 200
mules to carry them from Magdala to the nearest sea port. The prince died
barely a decade later of pleurisy and a broken heart, some 4,000 miles from
his homeland, in Leeds. Among his mourners was Queen Victoria herself.

While the life of Alemayehu ranks as little more than a colonial-era
curiosity in Britain, the events of 139 years ago are still keenly felt as
an injustice in Ethiopia. The country, where European visitors are proudly
reminded that it was never occupied for more than two years by a colonial
power, has conducted a decades-long campaign for the return of the
treasures. It recently celebrated the return of a 70ft obelisk from Italy.

These sentiments were resurrected two weeks ago when the country's
President, Wolde-Giorgis Girma, formally wrote to the Queen asking for the
remains of Prince Alemayehu to be exhumed and returned to Ethiopia for
burial in time for the country celebrating its millennium in September.
Ethiopia operates according to the Ethiopic calendar, which runs seven years
behind the Western Julian calendar and marks the new year in September. The
year 2000 will therefore arrive on 12 September 2007.

The campaign was further underlined yesterday when a nine-year-old schoolboy
of Ethiopian origin delivered a petition to Downing Street calling for the
restitution of the Magdala artefacts, which are spread throughout
institutions such as the British Library and British Museum and include six
illuminated manuscripts held in the royal library at Windsor.

Gabriel Kassayie, who collected more than 100 signatures among his
classmates at a primary school in Hampstead, north London, said: "I wanted
to do something. I learned how the artefacts were stolen from my country and
how attempts to get them back were prevented. I wanted to do this for my
ancestors."

Campaigners in Ethiopia argue that the epitaph to the prince in St George's
Chapel is laden with irony: Alemayehu was not so much taken in as spirited
away. Although Queen Victoria took a personal interest in Alemayehu's
upbringing (reputedly paying his fees for Rugby School), they argue he was
just as much of a "war trophy" as the gold crowns and altar pieces seized by
the army of Sir Robert Napier, sent by the monarch to crush Emperor Tewodros
in 1868.

Mulugeta Aserate, a second cousin of Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile
Selassie, and a senior figure on the organising committee of the millennium
celebrations, said the return of the remains for burial in a monastery in
the northern city of Gondar would remove a blight on relations with Britain.
He told The Independent: "The prince was a prisoner of war. Our relations
with Britain are good and warm but the episode of Prince Alemayehu
represents a dark side of that relationship.

"His return would be a cause for celebration here and what better time for
it than this very African millennium of ours? He died in a foreign land but
Alemayehu's name has not been forgotten in Ethiopia." It is a further irony
that the capture of the prince has its roots in an ill-fated attempt by his
father to foster strong relations with Britain. In the late 1860s, the
Christian emperor had sought the help of Britain in trying to protect
Ethiopia from the Ottoman Empire and Egypt.

When his entreaties went ignored and he imprisoned the British diplomatic
mission, Napier inflicted a crushing defeat against his army on 10 April
1868 at Magdala, a fortified mountaintop in central Ethiopia.

Tewodros freed the prisoners and sent the British general a gift of cattle
to be slaughtered for Easter Sunday two days' later. When Napier replied
with thanks, offering a safe conduct for Tewodros and his family, the
emperor angrily rejected the overture and vowed never to be taken alive.
After heavy bombardment, Tewodros committed suicide on Easter Monday,
leaving the British to loot the palaces and churches and capture his young
heir.

The American journalist Henry Morton Stanley who witnessed the aftermath of
the battle, describe how the plunder covered "the whole surface of the rocky
citadel, the slopes of the hill and the entire road to the [British] camp
two miles off".

The British insisted it had been the dying wish of Emperor Tewodros that his
son and his mother, Queen Terunesh, be looked after by the victorious power.

Whatever the truth of this, the leaders of the expedition recognised the
usefulness of the prince as a potential pawn in its efforts to expand
British dominion in east Africa to Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then known.

When Queen Terunesh died a month later on the journey from Magdala to the
Red Sea, a British officer, Captain Tristram Speedy, was appointed as the
guardian of the young boy.

Speedy, who was 6ft 6in and sported a bushy red beard, was a veteran of
British campaigns from India to New Zealand. Speedy, a speaker of Amharic,
the Ethiopian language, dismissed the prince's tutor, Alaqa Zenneb, before
beginning the sea voyage to Britain and it seems he rapidly formed a close
bond with his new charge. In his journal, he described how a terrified
Alemayehu refused to leave his side, day or night.

Speedy wrote: "The distressing alarm that then seized him rendered him so
timid that for the following three months no persuasion could induce him to
sleep out of my arms, so great was his terror that if he happened to wake
and find me asleep, he would wake me and earnestly beg me to remain awake
until he should fall asleep, and it was only by continued care and
tenderness that he is gradually losing his timidity."

There is no evidence that such comforting by the "gentle giant" officer was
anything other than paternal. But it is fitting proof of how the Victorian
empire builders saw their obligations towards a young boy considered a near
divinity in Ethiopia.

Once in England, the heir of the King Solomon, shown in early photographs
with the braided hair and elaborate costume of Abyssinian royalty, began his
conversion into an English gentleman. He left the care of Speedy and his
wife in 1871 and was sent to live with Dr Thomas Jex-Blake, the headmaster
of Cheltenham College, who later was appointed to the same post at Rugby
School.

Later pictures of the teenage prince, who was patronisingly recorded on his
voyage to Britain as not having "the faintest notion" what to do with a
knife and fork and had to be shown how to put marmalade on his toast, show
him dressed in a tweed suit reading a heavy tome. Evidence suggests the
photos were showing Alemayehu as something which he was not. Speedy recorded
"he had no interest in his books and had an utter dislike for anything in
that line" while his tutors at Rugby stated baldly: "Progress in study he
will never make." Instead, the prince was dispatched to Sandhurst Military
Academy. He was no happier there. Despite frequently expressing a desire to
return to Ethiopia, the government refused all his requests.

Dr Mandefro Belayneh, an Ethiopian academic researching the life of
Alemayehu, said: "He didn't have any friends or family to call on. There
were letters coming from Abyssinia from his grandmother ... and all the
letters said, 'When are you coming back? Your people are expecting you'. But
I suspect these letters were never shown to him."

The prince died in October 1879. His funeral was held in St George's Chapel.

Buckingham Palace yesterday declined to comment on the request from
President Girma. Ethiopian sources suggested that although the request was
being considered favourably, there were potential problems with identifying
the remains.

But arguably, the official verdict on Britain's role in the life of Prince
Alemayehu was delivered long ago. After his death, Queen Victoria wrote in
her diary: "It is too sad. All alone in a strange country, without a single
person or relative belonging to him. His was no happy life."

http://news.independent.co.uk/

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