THE DWINDLING BRITISH EMPIRE 2021

 

Recently there has been much ado about racism in the British royal family, whether or not it exists. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were the ones who set the cat among the pigeons and it has been a dog’s breakfast since the issue went public in early March. Some white British people have really exposed themselves and lost their jobs in the process. One would think that these people know the white supremacist history of their country including that of the British royal family. 

 

THE DWINDLING BRITISH EMPIRE 2021 

 

Murphy Browne © April 15-2021 

 

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born on April 21, 1926, 95 years ago and crowned Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953 even though she became queen when her father died on February 6, 1952. When I was a child, she was the de facto ruler of Guyana (British Guiana) until May 26, 1966. She was queen of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth which included countries in Africa, Australia, Central America, South America and the Caribbean islands. She was born to Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor, later George VI and Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth. Her father was born during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria and was named after his German great-grandfather Albert, Prince Consort. Victoria and her husband Albert were first cousins (her mother and his father were brother and sister) and they were both first cousin to the infamous Belgian monarch Leopold II.  

 

When Elizabeth II was crowned on June 2, 1953 she was already married (November 20, 1947) to her cousin Philip (both great-great grandchildren of Victoria and Albert) and the mother of two children. The Greek born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark became a naturalised British citizen and was given the title, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh after the marriage. On June 2, 1953, the British Empire included colonies where much of the population were racialized people, many of them the descendants of Africans who had been enslaved by the British crown and government. The “Crown” owned plantations and enslaved Africans in their colonies. Much of the enormous wealth that the British royal family enjoys in 2021 comes from the fortune made during the enslavement of Africans and the looting of the African continent. The “Crown-owned or winkel slaves” in New Amsterdam, Berbice, Guyana (British Guiana) were an example. “Estates were occasionally passed to the Crown in lieu of government taxes and following court cases. An example is Greenwich Hospital, which was managed by a government department for a number of years and took over Golden Vale plantation in Portland Parish, Jamaica in 1793.” In 2021, instead of colonies, there are 15 British Overseas Territories, countries that have the Queen as their figurehead. 

 

Slavery was abolished three years (August 1, 1834) before Victoria (the great-great grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II) ascended the throne on June 20, 1837. Victoria became queen during the four-year apprenticeship period (1834-1838) that was imposed on formerly enslaved Africans in the Caribbean islands, Belize (British Honduras) in Central America and Guyana (British Guiana) in South America. It was famously said that the sun never set on the British Empire and Britain ruled 30% of the African continent. When Elizabeth became queen in 1953, there was less of the British Empire and Africans were agitating for independence from British rule. On March 6, 1957, Ghana gained its independence from British colonization under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. During the struggle for independence Nkrumah was arrested by the British government in Ghana and sentenced to three years in prison but continued the struggle after he was released. Nigeria gained its independence from British colonization on October 1, 1960. 

 

Kenya in East Africa did not gain its independence from British colonization with the relative ease that Ghana and Nigeria in West Africa gained their independence. Kenyans waged a 10-year battle against the British colonizers from 1952 to gain their independence. After years of brutally resisting the Africans’ right to self-rule, Britain was forced to give Kenyans their independence on December 12, 1963. During those years of struggle for independence Kenyan freedom fighters were subjected to brutal, barbaric, vicious suppression by the British government. In its bid to retain control of the land it had stolen from the Africans, the British government committed atrocities reminiscent of the Nazis of WWII infamy. Ironically, Elizabeth who was the British heir to the throne was on a visit to Kenya during the time her government was terrorizing Africans in Kenya. Her coronation took place in London with pomp and splendour while this was happening. 

 

On Thursday, April 7, 2011 four Kenyans, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, in their 70s and 80s, brought their case for reparations to Britain’s High Court. Caroline Elkins a White history professor (author of “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya”) was called as an expert witness. Britain's Foreign Office admitted that some Kenyans were tortured and killed during “an anti-colonial rebellion in the 1950s,” but denied the current government had any responsibility for the survivors. On October 5, 2012 three of the elderly Kenyans were granted permission by Britain’s High Court to pursue claims for compensation for torture carried out by the British colonial-era government. A fourth claimant, Ndiku Mutua, had transitioned to the ancestral realm while they waited.  

 

In June 2013, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, gave a statement which included an apology and admission of guilt for Britain’s brutal suppression of the Kenyan freedom fighters in British controlled Kenya. The British government also promised to fund the construction of a monument to the Kenyan freedom fighters and pay approximately £14 million in compensation to 5,000 elderly Kenyans who were able to prove that they were tortured by the British forces. The surviving 5,000 victims are only a fraction of the approximately 25,000 Kenyans who were victims of British barbarity between 1952 and 1960.

  

 

The history of the British royal family’s involvement in the slave trade and their colonization of lands belonging to racialized people, certainly puts the recent brouhaha about British racism into perspective. Colonization steeped in White supremacy included land theft, rape and genocide; Britain was very much a part of that. Some of the active participants in the repression of African freedom fighters are alive today while others have gone on to whatever they deserve.  

 

Murphy Browne © April 15-2021 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6hcMRjCOxo

EASTER MONDAY APRIL 13-1868

 

In 1868, Easter Monday fell on April 13, a disastrous day for Ethiopians living in Maqdala, Ethiopia. On that Easter Monday, 153 years ago the community of Maqdala, Ethiopia was destroyed, burned and looted by a mob of British government representatives sent by the British monarch Victoria. The Ethiopians were outgunned by the British who were armed with the recently invented Snider- Enfield breech – loading rifle. The six-year-old Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros of Ethiopia who was left an orphan during the British attack was forcibly taken to Britain. The British monarch Victoria gave the child to a member of her military, Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy. On July 17, 1868, just three months after Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros was orphaned and taken to England, he was forced to pose with Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy, who was dressed in royal Ethiopian clothes. Many people seeing those photographs have mistakenly thought they were photographs of the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros and Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros of Ethiopia. The July 17, 1868 photographs were taken by British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron at her studio in Dimbola, Freshwater Bay Village on the Isle of Wight, England. Julia Margaret Cameron’s home and studio are now the Dimbola Museum and Galleries where the photographs she took of Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy dressed in royal Ethiopian clothes posing with the kidnapped and orphaned seven-year-old Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros of Ethiopia are part of the work on display.

Cultural appropriation:  A British White man, Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy who the British monarch Victoria appointed as "guardian" of the kidnapped seven-year-old Ethiopian Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros is seen in this photograph (July 17, 1868) dressed in royal Ethiopian clothes.

EASTER MONDAY APRIL 13-1868

Murphy Browne © April 6-2021

Easter is a time that many Christians commemorate the culminating event of their faith. Some Christians believe that it is a time that proclaims God's purpose of loving and redeeming the world through Christ’s supreme sacrifice. However, in the eyes of some, not all Christians are created equal.

The Easter season of 1868 ending on Monday, April 13, 1868, was an especially brutal time for African Christians living in Maqdala, Ethiopia. Over the three-day Easter weekend of 1868, Christian White men from Britain slaughtered Christian Africans in Ethiopia. On Easter Monday, 1868 after three days of fighting that began on Good Friday when the British attacked, the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II committed suicide rather than allow his enemies to capture him. On that Easter Monday of 1868 after the British captured the fortress of Maqdala, which was Emperor Tewodros’ mountain capital in north-west Ethiopia, the British soldiers celebrated by desecrating the body of the Ethiopian monarch, looting everything of value and burning the town.

Clements Robert Markham, who was recognized as the leading British historian, was part of the expedition. Markham wrote that Napier's men, on entering the citadel, swarmed around the body of the deceased monarch then: "gave three cheers over it, as if it had been a dead fox and then began to pull and tear the clothes to pieces until it was nearly naked." British journalist Henry Morton Stanley who wrote glowingly about the British “victory” at Maqdala corroborated Markham’s account of the events. In the 1874 published Coomassie And Magdala: The Story Of Two British Campaigns In Africa (reprinted in 2009) Stanley wrote of the scene where the Emperor’s desecrated body lay: "mob, indiscriminate of officers and men, rudely jostling each other in the endeavour to get possession of a small piece of Theodore's blood-stained shirt. No guard was placed over the body until it was naked, nor was the slightest respect shown it. It lay subjected to the taunts and the jests of the brutal-minded."

Those White Christian soldiers from Britain swarmed the area like locusts and looted not only the Emperor’s treasury but also the Christian church of Medhane Alem, including its store house, “constituting a gross act of sacrilege.” Describing the scene of the British soldiers dividing the property they looted from the Ethiopians, Stanley wrote: “The perambulatory roll of the drum which in all well governed and systematically military encampments announces a new move or new event, assembled all the officers and crowds of on-lookers around the piled trophies of Magdala which covered half an acre of ground. Fathoms of finest carpets of all countries were spread about, and all the paraphernalia of a thousand churches glittered in the morning sunlight.” Stanley described the British soldiers at the scene who were covetously waiting to take some of the loot back to Britain: “jostling each other in the characteristic confusion of mobs (and the most belligerent mob in the world is an English one.)”

In 2021, the religious manuscripts, crosses and other ecclesiastical objects stolen by the British troops, are in museums and some private collections in Britain. Sir Richard Rivington Holmes who was Assistant in the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts, wrote in an official report that on April 13, 1879, he met a British soldier, who was carrying the crown of the Abun, (the Head of the Ethiopian Church,) and a "solid gold chalice weighing at least 6lbs." Holmes bought the crown and the chalice for “£4 Sterling.”

Not satisfied with looting the treasures of the Ethiopian people, the British destroyed Maqdala. The arson attack began with destroying the fort/citadel. Every building, including the palace and the church of Medhane Alem, were set on fire. The British journalist Stanley reporting on the destruction wrote: "The easterly wind gradually grew stronger, fanning incipient tongues of flame visible on the roofs of houses until they grew larger under the skillful nursing and finally sprang aloft in crimson jets, darting upward and then circling round on their centres as the breeze played with them. A steady puff of wind leveled the flaming tongues in a wave, and the jets became united into an igneous lake!” Stanley wrote: “The heat became more and more intense; loaded pistols and guns, and shells thrown in by the British batteries, but which had not been discharged, exploded with deafening reports. Three thousand houses and a million combustible things were burning. Not one house would have escaped destruction in the mighty ebb and flow of that deluge of fire."

Not content with looting and destroying Maqdala, the British took the widowed Empress Tiruwork Wube and her son the six-year-old (born April 23, 1861,) Ethiopian prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros, prisoner. While the British kidnappers were transporting the Ethiopian Empress and prince, the Empress transitioned, and the prince was orphaned. Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu was taken to England where he transitioned on November 14,1879 when he was 18 years old. His remains are buried in a crypt beside St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.

Beginning with Emperor Tewodros’ successor, Emperor Yohannes IV, there have been numerous requests to the British monarchy and government for the return of Ethiopia’s stolen property. During the celebration of the Ethiopian Millennium (September 12, 2007,) the Ethiopian government made a formal request to Queen Elizabeth II for the remains of Prince Alemayehu to be returned to Ethiopia. The reply was: “The royal household at Windsor Castle, where Prince Alemayehu was buried, is said to be considering the request.” In April 2021, like the looted treasure of his homeland, the remains of the teenage prince who was taken prisoner after being orphaned by the British, remains in Britain 153 years after he was abducted by British government representatives.

Murphy Browne © April 6-2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqCw0b6fxRw 

EASTER 1868 IN MAQDALA ETHIOPIA

 Murphy Browne© Friday, April 2-2021 

 

 

EASTER 1868 MAQDALA ETHIOPIA 

 

One hundred and fifty-three years ago, on Good Friday of 1868, the African Christian nation of Ethiopia was attacked by Christian soldiers from Britain. Over the three-day Easter weekend of 1868, the group of good Christian white men slaughtered a community of good Christian Africans in Maqdala, Ethiopia. Although Easter is supposed to be a special time of celebration for Christians, the white Christian soldiers from Britain seemed to have abandoned their beliefs. It is believed that Christ’s crucifixion, death and resurrection happened around that time and the Easter weekend is supposed to be a time that Christians recognize as commemorating the culminating event of their faith. Those white Christians had no compunction in attacking African Christians, looting the Christian church of their African “brothers in Christ” and burning the church and homes of the Christian Ethiopians. The British soldiers were using the new .577 Snider- Enfield breech loading rifle and had a distinct advantage over the Ethiopian troops. 

 

 

On Easter Monday, 1868 after three days of fighting that began on Good Friday when the British attacked, the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II committed suicide rather than allow his enemies to capture him. On that Easter Monday of 1868 after the British captured the fortress of Maqdala, which was Emperor Tewodros’ mountain capital in north-west Ethiopia, the British soldiers celebrated by desecrating the body of the Ethiopian monarch looting everything of value and burning the town. Clements Markham, who was the leading British historian of the time was part of the expedition. Markham was on site and wrote that Napier's men, on entering the citadel, swarmed around the body of the deceased monarch then: "gave three cheers over it, as if it had been a dead fox and then began to pull and tear the clothes to pieces until it was nearly naked." They barbaric British mob even took locks of the Emperor’s hair as “souvenirs.” In the 1874 published “Coomassie And Magdala: The Story Of Two British Campaigns In Africa” (reprinted in 2009) British journalist Henry Morton Stanley wrote of the scene where the Emperor’s desecrated body lay: "mob, indiscriminate of officers and men, rudely jostling each other in the endeavour to get possession of a small piece of Theodore's blood-stained shirt. No guard was placed over the body until it was naked, nor was the slightest respect shown it. It lay subjected to the taunts and the jests of the brutal-minded." 

 

The Christian British soldiers swarmed Maqdala like locusts and looted the Emperor’s treasury and the Christian church of Medhane Alem, including its store house, “constituting a gross act of sacrilege.” Describing the scene of the British soldiers dividing the property they looted from the Ethiopians Stanley wrote: “The perambulatory roll of the drum which in all well governed and systematically military encampments announces a new move or new event, assembled all the officers and crowds of on-lookers around the piled trophies of Magdala which covered half an acre of ground. Fathoms of finest carpets of all countries were spread about, and all the paraphernalia of a thousand churches glittered in the morning sunlight.” Stanley described the British soldiers at the scene who were covetously waiting to take some of the loot back to Britain in this manner: “and jostling each other in the characteristic confusion of mobs (and the most belligerent mob in the world is an English one.)” The religious manuscripts, crosses and other ecclesiastical objects stolen by the British troops, today grace museums and some private collections in Britain. Sir Richard Rivington Holmes who was Assistant in the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts, wrote in an official report that “at dusk,” he met a British soldier, who was carrying the crown of the Abun, the Head of the Ethiopian Church, and a "solid gold chalice weighing at least 6lbs." Holmes bought the crown and the chalice for “£4 Sterling.” 

 

 

Not satisfied with looting the treasures of the Ethiopian people, the British destroyed Maqdala. The arson attack began with destroying the fort/citadel. The palace and all other buildings, including the church of Medhane Alem, were also set on fire. The British journalist Stanley reporting on the destruction wrote: "The easterly wind gradually grew stronger, fanning incipient tongues of flame visible on the roofs of houses until they grew larger under the skillful nursing and finally sprang aloft in crimson jets, darting upward and then circling round on their centres as the breeze played with them. A steady puff of wind leveled the flaming tongues in a wave, and the jets became united into an igneous lake! The heat became more and more intense; loaded pistols and guns, and shells thrown in by the British batteries, but which had not been discharged, exploded with deafening reports. Three thousand houses and a million combustible things were burning. Not one house would have escaped destruction in the mighty ebb and flow of that deluge of fire."  

 

 

The looted treasures of Maqdala were transported to the Dalanta Plain on 15 elephants and 200 mules. The stolen goods were shipped to Britain from the Dalanta Plain. On April 20 and 21, 1868, the British military held a two-day auction to disperse the stolen Ethiopian property. The British coveted the many "richly illuminated Bibles and manuscripts" and other property of the Ethiopian people and wanted them as souvenirs of the horror they had visited upon the Ethiopian people. The British Museum, now the British Library benefitted from the auction and received 350 Ethiopian manuscripts, many of them “finely illuminated.” The Royal Library at Windsor Castle received six “exceptionally beautiful specimens.” Some other recipients of the stolen Ethiopian manuscripts were the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Cambridge University Library, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, the Royal Library in Vienna, the German Kaiser and the Biblioltheque Nationale in Paris. Several of these manuscripts contain extensive archival material, including Tewodros's tax records and other data essential for the study of Ethiopian history. The stolen property also included two of Emperor Tewodros’ crowns and a royal cap, his imperial seal, the golden chalice and ten tabots from the church’s altar. Several beautifully decorated processional crosses were given to the South Kensington Museum, the name later changed to the Victoria and Albert Museum; two of the Emperor's richly embroidered tents are now in the Museum of Mankind, London. The barbarity of the British knew no bounds as they also stole locks of Emperor Tewodros’ hair, some of it displayed in the National Army Museum, London. 

 

 

Not content with looting and destroying Maqdala, the British took the widowed Empress Tiruwork Wube and her son the six-year-old Ethiopian prince Dejazmach Alemayehu Tewodros prisoner; just ten days before his 7^th birthday. While the Empress and prince were being taken away from their home, the Empress transitioned to the ancestral realm (May 16, 1868) and the prince was orphaned. There are no available records of what the Empress or the prince suffered at the hands of the British as they were being transported to the port and no records of the what the prince endured during his captivity. Prince Dejazmach Alemayehu was taken to England where he transitioned in 1879 when he was 18 years old. His remains are buried in a crypt beside St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. Over the years his tomb has been visited by numerous Ethiopians including His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I.

 

 

 

Beginning with Emperor Tewodros’ successor, Emperor Yohannes IV, there have been numerous requests to the British monarchy and government for the return of Ethiopia’s stolen property. On August 10, 1872 Emperor Yohannes IV, wrote to Queen Victoria and the British Foreign Secretary, Earl Granville, requesting the return of a Kebra Nagast and an icon, the Kwer’ata Re‘esu. Since they possessed more than one stolen copy, the British Museum very generously returned one copy of the Kebra Negast to Ethiopia. On December, 18, 1872 Queen Victoria replied to the Emperor declaring: "Of the picture (icon) we can discover no trace whatever, and we do not think it can have been brought to England." The icon was indeed part of the looted property that was taken to England but was not publicly acknowledged until 1890, a year after Emperor Yohannes's death. In 1905 a photograph of the icon appeared in “The Burlington Magazine,” a British art journal. Since the return of the Kebra Negast in the nineteenth century there has been great resistance by the British to return the looted Ethiopia property. An English woman who had in her possession a collection of Ethiopian manuscripts from Maqdala had several of them published in London, with translations by Sir Ernest Wallis Budge. These manuscripts were seen by Emperor Menelek’s envoy Ras Makonnen, (Emperor Haile Selassie I’s father) who was in England in 1902, for the Coronation of King Edward VII. In January 1910, perhaps in an attack of conscience, the woman who possessed the Ethiopian manuscripts bequeathed them in her will to Emperor Menilek. The Times reporting this, stated that "envoys from the Emperor were sent over to arrange for their [the manuscripts’] recovery, and it is believed that the present bequest is the fulfillment of a promise then given". The English woman died on December 20, 1910 but the powers that be refused to honour her bequest to return the manuscripts to the Ethiopian people. 

 

 

The Ethiopian president made a formal request to Queen Elizabeth II for the remains of Prince Alemayehu to be returned to Ethiopia in time for the celebration of the Ethiopian Millennium (September 12, 2007.) In an article published on Sunday, June 3, 2007 the BBC News reported: “The royal household at Windsor Castle, where Prince Alemayehu was buried, is said to be considering the request.” Like the looted treasures of his homeland the remains of the teenage prince who was taken prisoner after being orphaned and kidnapped by the British, still remain in Britain 14 years after that request was made. For more than 140 years the British have ignored the requests, refused to return the remains of the Ethiopian prince to be buried in his homeland. 

 

There was no escape from Britain for Prince Alemayehu. He could not speak publicly of any abuse, any acts of racism he suffered while in captivity. We will never hear his voice describing the emotional toll living as an African in Britain among the British royalty in the 1800s took on his mental health. He suffered for 11 years, from 1868 to 1879 before he transitioned. Thankfully, in 2021 there are those who were able to escape and live to tell the tale (their lived reality) very publicly in spite of the backlash!! 

 

Murphy Browne© Friday, April 2-2021