Ethiopia has never forgotten its boy prince, captured by the British army and taken to England where he died more than a century ago, a lonely, royal orphan and curiosity who still lies entombed in Windsor Castle.
As the country approaches millennium celebrations, officials in Addis Ababa have stepped up a push to have the remains of Prince Alemayehu repatriated.
”There is no way that this generation would allow for an Ethiopian prince and a prisoner of war to remain on foreign land as we close the second millennium,” said Mulugeta Asarate, vice-president of Ethiopia’s millennium committee.
Because Ethiopia follows its own Ethiopic calender, this ancient land on the Horn of Africa, one of the first kingdoms to adopt Christianity, will celebrate the year 2000 on September 12.
The prince spent barely a brief decade in his country of exile, arriving at age seven and dying at 18. He was looked upon kindly by Queen Victoria but never quite managed the conversion to English gentlemen his guardians had tried.
Mulugeta said Ethiopia’s President Wolde-Giorgis Girma has written a letter to the Queen Elizabeth II requesting the repatriation.
”When we look at our past, we see wrongs that need to be put right,” he said, adding the prince’s return would be a meaningful symbol for Ethiopia as it reflects on its history.
The president’s letter, he added, ”was reflecting the wishes and desires of the people of Ethiopia to see the remains of a one-time prisoner of war return and unite with his father in burial”.
Prince Alemayehu, born in 1861, was the son of the Empress Tiruwork and Emperor Tewodros, in a royal lineage that claims to go back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. When British forces conquered the imperial fortress of Magdala in 1868, the emperor committed suicide rather than turn himself in.
The British, who carried back numerous treasures and war trophies, decided to bring the prince and his mother to England reportedly as hostages, but the empress died during the trip due to reasons that remain unclear.
According to a book by Ethiopian academic Mandefro Belayneh, The Turbulent Life and Death of Prince Alemayehu, Queen Victoria described the youth as ”a pretty, polite, graceful boy with beautiful eyes and a nice nose and nice teeth, though the lips are slightly thick … There is nothing whatever of the Negro about him.”
The young prince became a student at Sandhurst, the prestigious military academy, but ”his was no happy life, full of difficulties of every kind, and he was so sensitive, thinking that people stared at him because of his colour, that I fear he would never have been happy”, the queen is quoted as writing in her diary.
Alemayehu died of pneumonia in Leeds in 1879 at the age of 18. At the request of Queen Victoria, he was reportedly entombed in the royal crypt at Saint George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.
During a trip to London in 1924, the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie deposited a plaque in the country’s Amharic language on his tomb.
Current Prime Minister Meles Zenawi left flowers there in 2002.
The bid to reclaim Prince Alemayehu is part of Ethiopia’s wider effort to recover war booty and other plundered pieces of its heritage.
”The campaign for the return of Ethiopian relics has been going on,” said Mulugeta. ”You can look at some of the replicas of the Ark of the Covenant that were taken from Magdala. They have been returned,” he said.
Ethiopia has already scored a major success with Italy’s return of an obelisk from the northern town of Axum, which stands 25m and dates from the fourth century. It was looted in 1937 when Italy occupied the country and erected it in Rome, where it stood for more than 65 years.
The three pieces of the 150-tonne stone will be re-erected at a cost of $4-million — to be paid by Italy.
Mulugeta said that negotiations with officials in Britain are continuing.
In London, a spokesperson for Queen Elizabeth II, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, told Agence France-Presse the palace did not comment
on private correspondence to the monarch.
But she said it ”is believed that Saint George’s Chapel was the final resting place for the prince. There is a plaque commemorating his life.”
”The prince’s remains have been treated with respect and dignity and are buried there [in Windsor Castle],” she added. ”That’s from records at the time.”
Belayneh’s book quotes Queen Victoria as being ”very grieved and shocked” when she learned the young Ethiopian prince had died.
”It is too sad,” she wrote, ”all alone in a strange country, without seeing a relative … so young and so good.” – Sapa-AFP