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

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Given the keen interest shown by British royals in the symbolism and placement of their relations’ bodies, sympathy for the Ethiopian request is natural. Alamayu never had the chance to write his own memoirs so almost all of the time we see Alamayu through other people’s eyes - whether they are British journalists, members of the public, or his classmates speaking on his behalf. All we have directly from Alamayu are a few scraps of writing and letters written for the moment. The 1972 print Catalogue of Ethiopian manuscripts of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London says: The [Meqdela] collection includes ceremonial crosses, chalices, processional umbrella tops, weapons, textiles, jewellery and archaeological material, as well as tabots (altar tablets that consecrate a church building that are highly sacred objects within the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition).’’’

Returning Heritage “A deeply moving account of a life cut short and the fate of a kingdom’s treasures … Heavens’ book tells this remarkable and unhappy story with authority and skill … surely the most definitive study of Alamayu and Maqdala to date … tragic, authoritative and deeply moving.”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. Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn Sissay Victoria took a shine to him and did her best to make sure he was looked after right until the end of his life. The first shall be last What: Fragment of a white marble relief sculpture carved with a cross in a circle, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea 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 book is extremely well researched and is compelling in its very honest and compassionate take of the life of the king of kings' heir and his ultimate fate. It clarifies the relationship Britain established with Abyssinia and its current ambivalence over this legacy. Particularly abhorrent are the findings that Alemayu's last wish to return to Ethiopia was denied by the British to satisfy the new Ethiopian ruler, Yohannes, who was worried Alamayu might usurp his reign. A life lost, a life wasted. His remains should indeed be sent home to Ethiopia. Restitution, of bodies and objects, is at the heart of Adam Kuper’s exploration of the history and current controversies surrounding anthropological and ethnographical collections. Most of this somewhat disjointed study is a competent, intermittently engaging, if somewhat laboured tale of the evolution of these now endangered disciplines and the institutions created for their exposition: the British Museum and its Museum of Mankind, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers, the Smithsonian, and the like.Presumably it’s the palace’s intention for Ethiopian petitioners to picture, as you do from euphemisms like “others in the vicinity”, scenes of such ghastly Hadean mayhem that they will tactfully withdraw. British subjects may, on the other hand, wonder if expert accounts, with diagrams, of what would become of the late queen’s body, disguised the fact that the royal vault is actually a chaotic ossuary in which unidentifiable parts of foreign princes are so carelessly jumbled up with those of Charles’s forebears that only DNA testing could positively tell them apart (some hair of Alemayehu’s father is in fact available, courtesy of Lord Napier’s pillaging Victorians). It would certainly accord with an earlier royal excuse for inaction that “identifying the remains of young Prince Alemayehu would not be possible”. Kuper cites the more famous example of the Benin Bronzes, taken by British forces in 1897. The city-state of Benin was located in what is now Nigeria, though, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “One thing we know for sure is they [their creators] didn’t make them for Nigeria.”