ADDIS ABABA: Two locks of hair belonging to widely revered Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros will be repatriated after a request from Addis Ababa, the National Army Museum in Britain announced Monday, as more African countries seek to reclaim heritage they say was taken decades, even centuries, ago.
An outcry erupted last year among some Ethiopians over an exhibit by another institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the 1868 British expedition to what was then called Abyssinia. During that campaign, in which 13,000 troops were deployed to free several British hostages, the emperor killed himself and his fortress was captured and looted.
Ethiopia’s government at the time said it would use “whatever legal and diplomatic instruments” to secure the return of related items including an intricate golden crown.
That another British museum, the National Army Museum, held locks of the emperor’s hair was seen as particularly sensitive. “Displaying human parts in websites and museums is inhumane,” Ethiopia’s minister for culture and tourism, Hirut Woldemariam, told The Associated Press last year.
That museum has said the hair was donated in 1959 by relatives of an artist who painted the emperor on his deathbed.
“Our decision to repatriate is very much based on the desire to inter the hair within the tomb alongside the emperor” at a monastery in northern Ethiopia, Terri Dendy, the National Army Museum’s head of collections standards and care, said in a statement.
It was not clear when the formal handover would occur. The Ethiopian Embassy in London said it would hold talks with the museum on Thursday about the repatriation, which comes at the end of a yearlong commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the confrontation known as the Battle of Maqdala.
The embassy in a statement commended the museum’s decision as an “exemplary gesture of goodwill,” adding that “a display of jubilant euphoria is to be expected when (the hair) is returned to its rightful home.”
Now Ethiopians say they seek the return of the bones of the emperor’s son, Prince Alemayehu, who was taken to Britain and died there at age 18. He was buried at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.
The decision to return the emperor’s hair is “a great start, both in encouraging the British toward looking into the possibilities of returning our looted antiquities and also the Ethiopian stakeholders whose decades-long, painstaking efforts actually can bear fruit,” Yonas Desta, director-general of Ethiopia’s Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, told the AP.
The bulk of what was taken, however, remains in the hands of the descendants of the British soldiers, according to Alula Pankhurst, a former professor at Addis Ababa University and an expert on Ethiopian studies.
“Some items in private collections have already been returned but the bulk of the items are in public collections within the UK and those cannot be restituted without an act of Parliament, and that is something that requires a big change in popular opinion and a bill has to be presented by members of Parliament,” he said last year. “This is something that cannot be done overnight.”
Some in Africa expect the momentum to grow in repatriating heritage from institutions overseas.
Late last year, a study by French art historian Benedicte Savoy and Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, recommended that French museums give back works that were taken without consent, if African countries request them.
That could increase pressure on museums elsewhere in Europe to follow suit. The experts estimated that up to 90 percent of African art is outside the continent, including statues, thrones and manuscripts.
British museum agrees to return emperor’s hair to Ethiopia
British museum agrees to return emperor’s hair to Ethiopia
- The Ethiopian Embassy commended the museum’s decision as an “exemplary gesture of goodwill”
Trump says will ‘de-escalate’ in Minneapolis after shooting backlash
- The turmoil could even result in a fresh US government shutdown, with Democrats threatening to block approval of routine spending bills up for votes in the Senate later this week
MINNEAPOLIS, United States: US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis after the fatal shootings of two civilians fueled a storm of criticism over his signature immigration crackdown.
Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan met with officials in the city as the Republican attempted damage control after the killing by immigration agents of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday.
The president also admitted that Gregory Bovino, a hard-line Border Patrol commander who is now expected to leave Minneapolis, was “a pretty out-there kind of a guy” whose presence may not have helped the situation.
“We’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” Trump told Fox News after days of tensions following the shooting of Pretti, while adding that it was not a “pullback.”
Trump said that Homan — the top US border security official, who brings a less confrontational communication style — met with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey Tuesday.
The US president told reporters that he rejected the “assassin” label used by a top aide to describe protester Pretti. “I want a very honorable and honest investigation,” he said.
Yet Trump did not hold back from criticizing Pretti for carrying a licensed firearm that was taken off him before he was shot.
“I don’t like that he had a gun, I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines,” the president said.
‘Pretty out there’
Mayor Frey said in a statement after meeting Homan that he discussed the “serious negative impacts this operation has had on Minneapolis,” and that the city “will not enforce federal immigration laws.”
Former Democratic vice presidential candidate Walz said he called for “impartial investigations” into shootings by federal agents in the city as well as a “significant reduction” in federal forces in the state.
Pretti’s death has sparked outrage nationwide.
Democratic former president Joe Biden on Tuesday said the situation “betrays our most basic values as Americans.” Ex-presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have also spoken out.
Pretti, shot multiple times after being knocked to the ground, was the second US citizen killed by immigration officers in Minneapolis this month, turning the city into ground zero of national tensions over Trump’s mass deportation policies.
Protester Renee Good, a mother of three, was shot by an agent at point blank range in her car on January 7.
The killings capped months of escalating violence in which masked, unidentified, and heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents have grabbed people suspected of violating immigration laws off the streets.
Despite multiple videos showing that Pretti posed no threat, top officials initially claimed he had been intending to kill federal agents.
Trump backed his under-fire Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, who described Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” saying she would not step down and was doing a “very good job.”
But he was less supportive of Bovino, a Border Patrol official famed for reveling in aggressive, televised immigration crackdowns who had also played up the narrative that Pretti had posed a threat.
“Bovino’s very good, but he’s a pretty out there kind of a guy. And in some cases, that’s good, maybe it wasn’t good here,” Trump told Fox.
‘Sickened’
Concern over the violence and the attempt to blame Pretti for his death quickly spread to Washington.
Republican Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday that agents involved in the shooting should be put on administrative leave, later adding that the heads of ICE, Border Patrol and Citizenship and Immigration Services would testify before the Congress next month.
Centrist Democratic Senator John Fetterman said “grossly incompetent” Noem should be fired.
The turmoil could even result in a fresh US government shutdown, with Democrats threatening to block approval of routine spending bills up for votes in the Senate later this week.
“The whole community is just sickened by all this,” said 68-year-old retiree Stephen McLaughlin in Minneapolis. “The aim of the government is to terrorize citizens, it’s really frightening.”
