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
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