Buckingham Palace has refused to return the remains of an Ethiopian Prince Alemayehu who was buried at Windsor Castle in the nineteenth century.
Prince Alemayehu was taken to Buckingham Palace when he was seven years old and arrived as an orphan after his mother died on the journey.
When he died at the age of 18, Queen Victoria took an interest in him and arranged for his education and burial.
His family, however, wishes for his remains to be returned to Ethiopia.
“We want his remains back as a family and as Ethiopians because that is not the country he was born in,” one of the royal descendants Fasil Minas told the BBC.
“It was not right” for him to be buried in the UK, he added.
“It is very unlikely that it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity,” the palace said.
The statement added that the authorities at the chapel were sensitive to the need to honor Prince Alemayehu’s memory, but that they also had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed”.
It also said that in the past the Royal Household had “accommodated requests from Ethiopian delegations to visit” the chapel.
The fact that Prince Alemayehu arrived in the UK at such a young age was the result of imperial action and diplomatic failure.
In an effort to strengthen his empire, the prince’s father, Emperor Tewodros II, sought an alliance with the United Kingdom in 1862, but Queen Victoria did not respond to his letters.
Angered by the silence, the emperor took matters into his own hands and held some Europeans, hostage, including the British consul. This prompted a massive military operation involving 13,000 British and Indian troops to rescue them.
The force also included a representative from the British Museum.
They laid siege to Tewodros’ mountain fortress at Maqdala in northern Ethiopia in April 1868 and overran the defences in a matter of hours.
The emperor decided he would rather die than be a prisoner of the British, a decision that made him a hero among his people.
Thousands of cultural and religious artifacts were looted by the British after the battle. Gold crowns, manuscripts, necklaces, and dresses were among them.
Historians estimate that dozens of elephants and hundreds of mules were required to transport the treasures, which are now scattered across European museums, libraries, and private collections.
In addition, the British kidnapped Prince Alemayehu and his mother, Empress Tiruwork Wube.
According to Andrew Heavens, whose book The Prince and the Plunder recounts Alemayehu’s life, the British may have thought this was to keep them safe and prevent them from being captured and possibly killed by Tewodros’ enemies who were near Maqdala.
Following his arrival in Britain in June 1868, the prince’s plight and status as an orphan drew Queen Victoria’s sympathy. They met on the Isle of Wight, just off England’s south coast, at the queen’s vacation home.
She agreed to financially support him and placed him in the care of Captain Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy, the man who had accompanied the prince from Ethiopia.
They first lived together on the Isle of Wight and then Captain Speedy took him to other parts of the world, including India.
But it was decided that the prince should have a formal education.
He was sent to the British public school Rugby but he was not happy there. He later moved to the Royal Military College in Sandhurst where he was subjected to bullying.
The prince had a “hankering” to return home, correspondence quoted by Heavens says, but that idea was swiftly quashed.
“I feel for him as if I knew him. He was dislocated from Ethiopia, from Africa, from the land of black people and remained there as if he had no home,” Ethiopian royal descendent Abebech Kasa told the BBC.
Eventually, Alemayehu ended up being tutored in a private home in Leeds. But he became ill, possibly with pneumonia, and at one point refused treatment thinking he had been poisoned.
After a decade in exile, the prince died in 1879 at the age of just 18.
His illness had become the subject of articles in the national press and Queen Victoria wrote in her diary of her sadness at his death.
“Very grieved and shocked to hear by telegram, that good Alemayehu had passed away this morning. It is too sad! All alone, in a strange country, without a single person or relative, belonging to him,” she said.
“His was no happy life, full of difficulties of every kind, and was so sensitive, thinking that people stared at him on account of his colour… Everyone is very sorry.”
She then arranged for his burial at Windsor Castle.
Demands that the body should return are not new.
In 2007 the country’s then-President Girma Wolde-Giorgis sent a formal request to Queen Elizabeth II for the body to be sent back, but those efforts proved fruitless.
“We want him back. We don’t want him to remain in a foreign country,” Ms Abebech said.
“He had a sad life. When I think of him I cry. If they agree to return his remains I would think of it as if he came home alive.”
She had hoped that she would get a positive response from the newly crowned King Charles III.
“Restitution is used as a way to bring reconciliation, to recognize what was wrong in the past,” says Professor Alula Pankhurst, a specialist in British-Ethiopian relations.
He believes the return of the body would be “a way for Britain to rethink its past. It’s a reflection and coming to terms with an imperial past.”
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