The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Books Please return our prince
Was Queen Victoria’s adoption of this African boy a case of human plunder?
For one brief moment Victorian Britain became obsessed with Ethiopia – or, as they knew it, Abyssinia. In 1868 Disraeli addressed the Commons to laud “one of the most remarkable military enterprises of the century”. That Easter, an Anglo-Indian force led by Sir Robert Napier had triumphed at Maqdala, the mountain-top fortress of Emperor Tewodros II, who had indulged in a bit of empirebuilding himself, forcibly uniting Ethiopia, before falling foul of the foremost imperialists of the age.
In the face of defeat, Tewodros shot himself; his wife, Tirunesh, died of disease a month later. This left their seven-year-old son, Alamayu – the subject of Andrew Heavens’s worthy, if ultimately unsatisfying, biography. It starts reasonably well, with the interesting and welldocumented tale of Britain’s early engagement with Ethiopia.
The story of John Bell and Walter Plowden is like a cross between Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and George Macdonald Fraser’s The Flashman Papers (tellingly, both Kipling and Fraser have a firmer handle on the nature of empire than Heavens, who is too eager to pass judgment 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, and Plowden, the consular agent for protection of British trade, had teamed up and became allies of the anglophile Tewodros, who declared that “for the love of Christ I want friendship” when he wrote to Victoria.
Fantasy met reality when, in 1860, Plowden was captured by rebels opposing Tewodros and died of his wounds. In a subsequent attack, Bell was also killed. Relations between Britain and
‘You English smile at people you hate,’ Alamayu told Lord Tennyson
Tewodros became tense to the point that Napier’s force was sent to take Maqdala, aided, or at least unhindered, by regional princes who loathed the violent Tewodros. A great deal of loot – largely bought up by the British Museum’s Richard Rivington Holmes, and helpfully listed by Heavens in the appendix – was taken to Britain. Much remains in the British Museum, the V&A, and “mouldering away in homes stately, and not so stately”.
Alamayu – human plunder, it might be said – was taken into the care of Captain Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy, a 6ft 6in Amharic speaker, who became his “towering guardian”, as Heavens calls him. He accompanied Alamayu as he left his land for good on June 11 1868. Queen Victoria sought out the boy – “I kissed him which he returned,” she wrote in her journal – put him up on the Isle of Wight, and insisted that he was to stay with Speedy and his new wife.
Alamayu, something of a minor celebrity, met another famous resident of the Isle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to whom he observed acutely: “There’s one thing I don’t like in England. We Abyssinians look angry at a man when we hate him, but you English smile at people while you are hating them. You
don’t speak the truth with your faces.” Ultimately, Speedy and Alamayu would separate, as the latter entered Cheltenham College, where the boys called him “Ali”, and he did not prosper.
Heavens makes many tenuous claims; footnotes or endnotes would have been preferable to the summary of sources he offers at the book’s end. He suggests Alamayu’s melancholy nature and poor performance at school were due to dyslexia – though “it is a risky business diagnosing anyone from the distance of 160 years, especially with no medical or other relevant expertise”. Well, quite. The book is written in an uneasily breezy style. Readers are told to “hold tight”, that “it’s a fair cop”. In telling rather than showing, Heavens does Alamayu a disservice. His tragic tale needs neither elaboration nor anachronistic moralising.
After a failed military career, Alamayu died, aged 18, from pneumonia. He received a royal funeral at the behest of Victoria, and he’s commemorated in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. There are those who wish to see the remains of Alamayu, who lived most of his life in Britain, returned to Ethiopia.
Restitution, of bodies and objects, is at the heart of Adam Kuper’s exploration of the history and controversies surrounding anthropological collections. Most of this disjointed study is an intermittently engaging account of the evolution of these now endangered disciplines and related institutions: the British Museum and its Museum of Mankind, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers, the Smithsonian, and the like.
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 and pieties Anglophone countries are especially susceptible.
In Britain, the Pitt Rivers has been at the heart of this controversy, and Kuper’s account of its administrators’ current contortions would be laugh-out-loud funny, if it didn’t also endorse a world view – as Kuper points out – that is indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s “alternative facts”. Its current director invited a Masaii shaman to divine how objects in the collection came into the museum’s keeping. Sitting on the floor of the director’s office, he breathed into a vessel packed with stones and snuff tobacco (surely of concern to health and safety). Using his “mystical powers” – presumably, more effective than scholarship – he then chose five artefacts to be “returned” to a Tanzanian institution yet to be designated. Such are the rigorous standards adhered to by the modern – or, more accurately, postmodern – curator.
Some scholars are more robust in the face of dubious claims. According to Nicholas Thomas, the refreshingly rational director of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, “the bulk of what is in anthropological collections was obtained through purchase or exchange” rather than plunder. Yet even genuine loot raises complex questions concerning ownership. One example is the Qurata Rezoo, plundered by Holmes in 1868 for his private collection. This image of Christ, the most sacred icon of the Ethiopian people after its mysterious arrival in the 16th century, is the work of a Renaissance master, probably Flemish. It has since entered the collection of a Portuguese art historian. This work – of Flemish origin, Portuguese ownership, and sacred to Ethiopians – has not been seen since 1998.
Kuper cites the famous example of the Benin Bronzes, taken by British forces in 1897. The citystate of Benin was in what is now Nigeria, although, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “One thing we know for sure is they [their creators] didn’t make them for Nigeria.” Nevertheless, Nigeria has been promised the return of most of the 39 bronzes held by the Smithsonian. Yet Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments is unable to display all of those already in its collection. And would it be worth it, given that the National Museum in Lagos receives an average of 30 visitors a day?
Adamant that “the local cannot be curtained off from the global”, Kuper ends with a plea for the “Cosmopolitan Museum”, which sounds suspiciously like the British Museum, the Smithsonian, et al. A space, backed by research, that “transcends ethnic and national identities, draws out connections, tracks exchanges across political frontiers, challenges boundaries”. The alternative, he argues with courage and conviction, is a solipsism that “appeals to mystical insight”, or the “authority of identity” – a deadening, dictatorial and incurious space where objective truth and fact count for nothing.