Socialist Worker 1950, 5 May 2005 (www.socialistworker.co.uk)
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6393

International

Joy as stolen objects are returned to Africa

An extraordinary event has taken place in one of Africa’s most significant
historic sites.

On Monday 25 April, the third and final section of an ancient granite
obelisk was returned to Axum — Ethiopia’s one-time capital. It had stood in
Rome since 1937, when it was taken there by the troops of Mussolini, the
Italian fascist dictator.

The celebrations marking the return were a powerful expression of national
delight that a wrong had, at last, been righted.

Many thousands of people waited eagerly on Axum’s streets from early morning
until the giant plane carrying the final piece of a plundered treasure
landed.

Unparalleled artistry
The Axum obelisk is not only valuable for its antiquity (it may be as much
as 2,000 years old) or its unparalleled artistic quality.

Its primary value lies as a symbol of national and religious identity.
Although the burial markers of Axum, of which this obelisk is one, predate
the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, they are a powerful symbol of the religious
and historic lineage of the Ethiopian people.

Axum is of profound importance for the identity of a people and the returned
obelisk belongs in that place at least as much as Stonehenge belongs in its
place or the Pantheon belongs in Rome.

Mussolini’s imperialist ambitions were played out ruthlessly and violently
in Ethiopia. 

Were it not for the courageous and tireless efforts of the British socialist
and women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst to keep the events in the
Western public eye, this appalling episode in Europe’s fascist past may have
gone unnoticed by many.

The barbarism of the theft of the obelisk was the barbarism of one nation
demonstrating its subjugation of another by the theft of its very identity.

It was a deliberate and humiliating act of a violent and expansionist
regime. For this reason, the return of the obelisk is a way of stating that
the pretensions of Western militarist dominance have no place in our world.

Before relaxing into complacency about the undoing of an unmistakable crime
of international significance, it is worth reflecting on Britain’s own
culpability in the theft of Ethiopian national identity.

Siege of Magdala
British institutions such as the British Museum, British Library and Windsor
Castle still house the plunder of a previous imperialist escapade — the
British siege of Magdala.

This took place in 1868 when an expeditionary force of 30,000 laid waste to
the stronghold of the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros after removing thousands of
sacred texts and other items of the greatest religious significance. 

This was another deliberate and humiliating act of a violent and
expansionist regime (see description below, left). But it is not too late to
undo this wrong too.

Repeated calls from the Ethiopian church, government and academic
institutions, not to mention citizens and friends from around the world,
have fallen on deaf ears.

The British institutions maintain a neo-imperialist stance in relation to
this loot. They contend they have a role in guarding the world’s cultural
inheritance.

The Association for the Return of the Magdala Ethiopian Treasures (Afromet)
regards this as an unacceptable arrogance and calls for the repatriation of
a nation’s heritage.

It asks, “Is it acceptable to tolerate a world in which the domination of
the powerful goes unquestioned under the genteel veneer of a cultural
service to nations who are deemed incapable of looking after their own
property? The British government might consider taking a leaf out of the
Italians’ book and end the injustice of decades.”

John McLuckie is chair of Afromet UK. For more go to www.afromet.org

The following should be read alongside this article: 

How British imperialism looted Ethiopia in 1868

The pillage of Magdala is well documented in contemporary British accounts.

One historian says that British troops swarmed around the body of the
deceased Ethiopian monarch. They 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”.

The loot from Magdala, included “an infinite variety of gold, and silver and
brass crosses”, as well as “heaps of parchment royally illuminated”, and
many other articles which were “scattered in infinite bewilderment and
confusion until they dotted the whole surface of the rocky citadel, the
slopes of the hill and the entire road to the [British] camp two miles off”.

Sir Richard Holmes, assistant in the British Museum’s department of
manuscripts, had been appointed the expedition’s “archaeologist”. He wrote
how 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 succeeded in purchasing both for £4.

The loot from Magdala was transported, on 15 elephants and almost 200 mules,
to the nearby Dalanta Plain. There the British military authorities held an
auction to raise “prize money” for the troops — and especially the officers.
The British Museum received 350 Ethiopian manuscripts. A further six
exceptionally beautiful specimens were acquired by the Royal Library at
Windsor Castle.

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