The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia

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Provenance: One of three gold discs described in the museum’s temporary register as “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” What: A fragment of a 6th century white marble column, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea

Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn Sissay Her reaction was fairly typical - even though she was sympathetic and friendly, she was also intensely interested in his physical differences to other white Europeans. She wanted to slot him into the racial hierarchy that dominated British thinking at that time: how far down the scale should he go? Heavens is a good storyteller and guides us with a sure pen through the events of 1868 and beyond. He sprinkles in first hand sources throughout the book so that people who met or knew Alamayu, like Queen Victoria, can speak to us directly. For the first time, Andrew Heavens tells the whole story of Alamayu, from his early days in his father's fortress on the roof of Africa to his new home across the seas, where he charmed Queen Victoria, chatted with Lord Tennyson and travelled with his towering red-headed guardian Captain Speedy. The orphan prince was celebrated but stereotyped and never allowed to go home.the horn has a cover inscribed: “THE DRINKING HORN OF KING THEODORE’S WAS TAKEN FROM MAGDALA by Lieut C M Davidson ADJUTANT 4TH KINGS OWN ROYAL REGIMENT 13th April 1868”. There is a shied on the front inscribed: “TO Lieut Colonel Edmond A Shuldham OF COOLKELURE FROM HIS FRIEND Capt C M Davidson”. Part revisionist history, part treasure hunt, this is the forgotten story of Ethiopia's 'Elgin Marbles' and a young prince taken out of Africa to live in Victorian Britain During the progress of the excavation fragments of carved marble, flat pieces of alabaster, having one side well-polished, were dug up, and some fragments of marble shafts; also one carved capital in marble, which may be referable to Byzantine architecture. Rough drawings of all these fragments are herewith submitted, and may prove interesting to those possessing more archaeological knowledge than I can lay claim to. The seven year old Alamayu had lost his father and his mother, and he was about to lose his country too - bundled onto a waiting ship, he would never return to Ethiopia. What’s in the book?

By good fortune, Alamayu’s uncles were not part of the massacre. His Grandfather is thought to have died in prison the year before in 1867. ↩︎ So why, while it has learned to contextualise the Koh-i-noor, does the palace still assert proprietorship of a child victim of conquest? Since they’re safe from a rush on prince-restitution that would leave mausoleums empty, the greater risk for the royals would seem to be in sabotaging, with this intransigence, their own claims to have changed. Unless they really have lost him? This may sound a bit dry but it is actually fascinating because it allows us to see how central this story of Tewodros and Alamayu is to modern Ethiopians and how much these artefacts mean to them - and how incidental they are to most people in Britain. 2

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In his recent biography of Alemayehu, The Prince and the Plunder, Andrew Heavens follows the palace’s excuses with the history: the prince was buried outside St George’s chapel, in catacombs, in a named coffin. Queen Victoria had taken an interest in the child since he was brought to her, aged seven, survivor of the Maqdala conflict in which British forces defeated his father, King Tewodros II.

I have been unable to discover any capitals to suit the stone columns, nor is there any trace of how the roof of this building was supported.looted Maqdala and the orphaned Alemayehu (his mother died on the journey), was subjected to a fragmented upbringing that he spent largely, to judge by Heavens’s account and some piercing photographs, in forlorn misery. Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodies, with some batches transferred to Frogmore, all at no recorded cost to the “dignity of the departed”, albeit that community cannot speak for itself. If like me you didn’t know anything about Alamayu and the Maqdala treasures beyond some vague memories of a Flashman novel, this is a fascinating and eye opening account. It is also hugely relevant for today - particularly in Ethiopia, but also for many other countries that will have had similar dealings with Britain in the 19th Century. Yet the book comes alive in its final third, when Kuper confronts the consequences for museums of the current obsession with identity politics – ironically, an import from the culturally colonising United States, to whose fads, pieties and loose relationship with facts Anglophone countries are especially susceptible.