Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn Sissay 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. 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 One of six ecclesiastical manuscripts from Maqdala, currently part of the Queen of England’s personal collection in the Royal Library in Windsor Castle.

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. Andrew Heavens takes us through the traumatic events of Alamayu’s early childhood and subsequent life in Britain as a ward of the state, where he was placed into the care of Captain Speedy, a 2 metre tall eccentric ginger Scottish adventurer. 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. Alamayu and his mother witnessed the horde of victory crazed British soldiers charging over their compound, grabbing whatever looked valuable, and (very probably) assaulting the women who lived there. His mother was only saved from molestation by a senior British prisoner and an officer, who arrived just in time to set an armed guard on the room in which they were hiding. A great mourning The columns, judging from the portions lying about, were apparently in their original state built up, clamped with iron and run with lead.

Comments

For the first six years of his life, Alamayu lived in Maqdala. As Andrew Heavens tells us in The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia, Maqdala was an Ethiopian mountain-top fortress-prison and stronghold of the King: Tewodros II. His mother, Tirunesh, was the King’s reluctant wife and daughter of his great rival - who lived in Maqdala as well. Alamayu’s grandfather was housed in the prison, along with two of Alamayu’s uncles on his mother’s side. Also held captive were a handful of British citizens whom Tewodros had detained up to 4 years ago. Complicated family politics aside, it must have been a secure, comfortable and sheltered existence. 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.

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.“ 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 1972 print Catalogue of Ethiopian manuscripts of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London says: The part on al-muhlikat from an ethical work by Ibrahim b. al-Husayn b. `Ali al-Faradi al-Qadiri (718/1318), GAL S II, 147. CCO V, p. 256 (No. 2660) gives a survey of the contents. CCO 2660 (V, pp. 256-257). See Voorhoeve, Handlist, p. 448. 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”.The story of John Bell and Walter Plowden is like a cross between Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and a volume of the Flashman Papers (tellingly, both Kipling and George Macdonald Fraser have a firmer handle on the nature of empire than Heavens, who is too eager to pass judgement on those “brought up in the deep prejudices of their time” – presumably our prejudices are of a shallower nature). Bell, a British explorer who had gone native on his travels, teamed up with Plowden, the Consular Agent for Protection of British Trade in the region, and became allies of the anglophile Tewodoros, who declared that “For the love of Christ I want friendship”, when he wrote to Victoria. What: Gold disc “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” showing the crucifixion, bought from Col W J Holt Given the keen interest shown by British royals in the symbolism and placement of their relations’ bodies, sympathy for the Ethiopian request is natural. I can recommend comedian James Acaster for a 3 minute run-through of the arguments for and against repatriation on this youtube video. ↩︎ 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.

What: Gold disc “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” showing the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, bought from Col W J Holt 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.

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.” What: Horn, said to belong to Tewodros, later mounted in silver, engraved and turned into a pitcher Fundamentally though it is a human story, about a small child cast adrift - about his fall from the mountain-top, to become “one of us”, to know good and evil. There is a footnote saying Christopher Middlemass Davidson and Edmond Anderson Shuldham are linked through the South Cork Militia. It adds: Alamayu headed to India with Speedy when the latter was appointed a District Superintendent in what is now Uttar Pradesh, and later to Penang, when the guardianship was questioned by Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ultimately, Speedy and Alamayu would separate, as the latter entered Cheltenham College, where the boys called him “Ali”, and he did not prosper.

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.” Too bad: the palace wants Alemayehu kept where he was put, on Queen Victoria’s instructions. Since it can hardly say the request is over-ambitious – Philip’s mother’s body was flown from Windsor to Jerusalem 19 years after her death – its refusal, reported by the BBC, cites both practical and propriety-related objections. “It is very unlikely,” the palace says, “that it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity.” It said the chapel authorities had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed”. The book is written in an uneasily breezy style. Readers are told to “hold tight”, that “it’s a fair cop”, and there is a lot of “perhaps” and “maybe”. And in telling rather than showing, Heavens does Alamayu a disservice. His tragic tale needs neither elaboration nor anachronistic moralising. 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. 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. 2On 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. Below is his report, as it appeared in the official record of the expedition, compiled by Holland and Hozier. 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.