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 The Economist “Heavens has produced an exceptionally fascinating, evenly balanced and moving account of Alamayu’s life. While there are scores of books recounting the story of Tewodros and the events at Maqdala, there are precious few biographies of this young prince… and none of them more rewarding to read than this one.“ 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. His revision of his mother’s decision would add a progressive flourish to an act requiring nothing more of the palace than is, when not actively mandated by the Geneva conventions, common decency. There could even be room for some tasteful restitution ritual, possibly involving uniforms, where Charles’s default expression of bemused gloom would be utterly appropriate. William and Kate, too, could do their mournful faces and fancy dress, welcoming this opportunity to show that animals and dancing are not the only thing royals love about Africa. Andrew’s absence might be approvingly noted. 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.

One of six ecclesiastical manuscripts from Maqdala, currently part of the Queen of England’s personal collection in the Royal Library in Windsor Castle. I can recommend comedian James Acaster for a 3 minute run-through of the arguments for and against repatriation on this youtube video. ↩︎ 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? 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.What: Gold disc “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” showing an angel, bought from Col W J Holt

As shown on the plan, the building was erected east and west; at the last end there are the remains of may once have been an altar, and the masonry exposed leads to the supposition that the last end was shaped in the form of an apex. 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. 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. Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn SissayHeavens makes many tenuous claims; footnotes or endnotes would have been preferable to the summary of sources he offers at the book’s end. At Cheltenham, Alamayu “mastered the chief virtues of public school life – the suppression and repression of troubling emotion” – how does he know? Heavens also suggests that Alamayu’s melancholy nature and poor performance at school were due to dyslexia – though he at least adds the caveat that “it is a risky business diagnosing anyone from the distance of 160 years, especially with no medical or other relevant expertise”. Well, quite. 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? Ironically, this image of Christ, which had become the most sacred icon of the Ethiopian people after its mysterious arrival in the 16th century, is the work of a European Renaissance Master, probably Flemish. In 1744, it had been captured by Sudanese Muslims, and its return to Ethiopia 20 or so years later was greeted with unbridled joy. Holmes’s widow sold it via Christie’s in 1911, and it has since entered the collection of the Portuguese art historian Luiz Reis Santos. This work, of Flemish origin, of Portuguese ownership, and sacred to Ethiopians, has not been seen since 1998. Its fate currently rests in the hands of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. Prof Richard Pankhurst, AFROMET vice chair, described the six illuminated books as “six of the finest Ethiopian religious manuscripts in existence”. He added: “These were specially selected for Queen Victoria, and are therefore, from the artistic point of view, virtually without equal anywhere in the world.” 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. ↩︎

For a service template, how about something like the memorial ceremony in 2013, when the Serbian royal family was allowed – Queen Elizabeth having authorised the exhumation – to repatriate Queen Maria of Yugoslavia from Frogmore? Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodiesWhat: An Arabic manuscript found by a Mr. J.F.E. Prince “in the camp of the emperor Theodorus II in Magdala” 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. I have the honour to report that in accordance with the wishes of his Excellency the Commander-in-Chief, as communicated to me at Antalo on the 14th ultimo, I lost no time on coming to Zula, arriving here on the 24th ultimo. 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. 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.”

The 1972 print Catalogue of Ethiopian manuscripts of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London says: On one of the last slabs found there is a carved cross, which lends strength to the supposition that the building now exposed was one of the early Christian Churches, but whether it stands on the debris of still older buildings or not I have been unable to determine, as the excavations have scarcely been carried deep enough. 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 For the first time, The Prince and the Plunder 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. Before his death Alemayehu had “hankered”, Heavens writes, for Ethiopia. During his lifetime his plight touched some would-be protectors, including Victoria (his Windsor burial was a respectful gesture), while one of her prime ministers, William Gladstone, condemned the removal, at the same time as the child, of Abyssinian spoils. He “deeply lamented”, Hansard recorded, “that those articles, to us insignificant, though probably to the Abyssinians sacred and imposing symbols, or at least hallowed by association, were thought fit to be brought away by a British Army.”The British Museum database entry reads: “Octagonal screen post fragment (lower end); white marble; with grooves for fitting panels.” On informing the Commanding Engineer that I had been directed to apply to him for a working party to enable me to make excavations with a view to discovering some remains of ruins of ancient Adulis, I was told that owing to the amount of work in hand just at that time I could not have more than 25 men of the Madras Sappers and Miners; with this small party, however, I at once made a commencement. Three narrow trenches being cut into some of the tumuli the walls and foundations of old buildings were discovered. At one spot some cut stone columns were found, and this induced me to remove more of the debris in the immediate vicinity, when the outline of a building, as shown in the accompanying plan, was discernable. I also ascertained by excavation that the foundations of this building, in which the bases of the cut-stone columns were found in true position, were 13 feet deep. They were part of the original haul of manuscripts given to the British Museum in the aftermath of the campaign. Museum staff selected the six most beautiful volumes and presented them to Queen Victoria.