We return today to the question of Ethiopia's image abroad. It can be seen in many areas: literary works, set in Ethiopia, like Johnson's 18th. century allegory Rasselas, or dealing with Ethiopian personages, like Verdi's 19th. century opera Aida, as well as in historic paintings, and music, on the Queen of Sheba, etc.
Ethiopia's external image can likewise be seen in many street, place, or public-house names, as well as in statues, connected with Ethiopia, or events of Ethiopian history. We concentrate, in this article, on Britain, but hope that a reader more familiar with Italy will carry out a corresponding investigation of streets and statues there.
The British invasion of Ethiopia in 1867-8, the triumph of British arms, and the successful release of Emperor Tewodros's European captives, created considerable stir in nineteenth century Britain. Many engravings of the expedition appeared in The Illustrated London News. The name Maqdala (or Magdala, as the British then called it) had until then scarcely been heard of in Britain. But Sir Robert Napier's victory put it overnight on a million British lips.
That was a time of economic growth in Britain: the time of the Industrial Revolution. Urbanisation was proceeding rapidly: new streets were being opened, and had to be named. The name Magdala appealed to the British chauvinism, and was easy to pronounce. It sounded good.
London at once gave the name Magdala to three roads: in Islington, Isleworth, and Croydon. The name was also given to streets in the provinces. The Manchester area had two Magdala Streets, one in Heywood, the other in Oldham. Liverpool had a third. Birmingham, Nottingham, and two districts of Portsmouth (Cosham and Hayling Island) had Magdala Roads; Edinburgh, a Magdala Crescent and a Magdala Mews, and Southend-on-Sea, a Magdala Avenue.
Britain was then becoming more sober than half a century earlier, and the number of public houses was declining. The British victory nevertheless appealed to the "drinking classes". Several public houses were immediately named after the far off Ethiopian citadel. Two Magdala Taverns came into existence in London, one in South Hill Park, Camden; the other in Lordship Lane, Southwark. In Bath, a hotel-keeper called his establishment Villa Magdala.
Napier's expedition was popularly known in Britain as the Abyssinian Campaign. The Clapham authorities therefore called a thoroughfare Abyssinian Road. Nottingham, which had contributed a regiment to the expedition, named one of its streets Zulla Road, after the port where the British landed.
Robert Napier, was the British hero of the hour. Raised to the peerage, on 17 July 1868, he took the title Baron Napier of Magdala. He was so popular that half a dozen public houses in or around London were named after him. These were the General Napier in Lewisham; three Lord Napiers, in Richmond, Tower Hamlets, and Greenwich, and two Napier Arms, in Wandsworth, and Woodford High Road, Waltham Forest. Public houses were also so named elsewhere in the country. There were Napiers in Liverpool and Bradford, Lord Napiers in Hulme, Leicester, Southsea, Goodmayes, Oxford, Kings Lynn, Thornton Heath, and Becontree; Napiers Arms at Gillinham and Mountain Ash; and a Napier Hotel at Sheerness. They were all named within a year or two of the battle.
An equestrian statue of Lord Napier, victor of Magdala, was commissioned by Sir Joseph Boehm, and erected in Calcutta, India, but later brought to Waterloo Place, London. This statue was subsequently moved to Queens Gate, in west London, and, by a curious historical twist, is only a stone's throw from the present Ethiopian Embassy,
Emperor Tewodros's orphaned son Alamayehu Kasa (or Tewodros) was brought to Britain, reportedly at his mother's request. He was much beloved by Queen Victoria. When he died, in 1879, at the age of nineteen, the old lady wrote in her diary that she was "very grieved and shocked... to hear that good Alamayou had passed away... It is too sad. All alone in a strange country, without seeing a relative..., so young and so good". She added: "his was no happy life, full of difficulties of every kind, and he was so sensitive, thinking that people stared at him because of his colour, that I fear he would never have been happy". (True, it would probably have been better if he had been allowed to return to Ethiopia, as his grandmother, Woizero Laqiyaye, had earlier requested).
Good Queen Victoria had Alamayehu buried at her residence, Windsor Castle. His unmarked grave is in the compound of St George's Church. Regent Tafari Makonnen, the future Emperor Haile Sellassie, visiting Britain in 1924, had a plaque put up in the church, in memory of the Prince. Later, on becoming Emperor, he returned to Windsor, and had a further inscription added.
Victoria also had a bust of Alamayehu cast. It is preserved in her former palace, at Sandringham, in the Isle of Wight.
After the Maqdala expedition, British interest in Ethiopia declined. The British Government made use of Emperor Yohannes, in 1884, to help with the rescue of Egyptian garrisons and others besieged by the Mahdists in Sudan, but later double-crossed him by encouraging the Italians to come to what was to become the colony of Eritrea. This, as A. B. Wylde, sometime British consul for the Red Sea area, noted, was scarcely known to the wide British public. (See his book "Modern Abyssinia"). The British Government later sent Emperor Yohannes a "Sword of Honour", but the AngloEthiopian co-operation of that time is not recorded in any street names, or statues. It was any case General Gordon's heroic, if misguided, defence of Khartoum which captured popular imagination in Britain, in a big way.
The Battle of Adwa, of 1896, which should perhaps have been the subject of a statue in Addis Ababa many moons ago, left the British public cold. Many of those who followed such events were in fact sad at the result of the battle, which they saw as the defeat of a fellow Colonial Power. "The Times", thinking perhaps of the Sudanese Dervishes who had killed Gordon, nevertheless informed its readers that the Ethiopians were by no means savages.
The next British naming of streets after things Ethiopian was by a private individual: the British big-game hunter, and ethnographer, Percy Powell-Cotton. He travelled to Ethiopia, at the beginning of the century, by way of British Somaliland, visited Gondar, and left through the then new Italian colony of Eritrea. He was deeply interested in Ethiopia, took many photographs (on which see our recent book "Ethiopia Photographed", now on sale at the Hilton Hotel). He also acquired innumerable ethnographic objects, and some Church paintings, from Gondar. These are on display at the PowellCotton Museum, at Quex Park, Birchington, Kent. A visit to it is well worthwhile.
Powell-Cotton, to return to our theme, was a wealthy landowner, with property in West Hampstead, London. He named a street on his estate Menelik Road, and three adjacent ones, Somali Road, Asmara Road, and Gondar Gardens.
The Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935-6, was condemned at the League of Nations by no less than fifty nations, and created world-wide indignation. This was particularly the case in Britain, which was shocked by Mussolini's use of poison-gas, and by the deliberate fascist bombing of Red Cross hospitals and ambulances, especially the British Red Cross Unit. (On British reactions see Daniel Waley, "British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War 1935-6").
Support for Ethiopia came in Britain from several distinct quarters, one of them the internationalist, and pacifist Left. Several years earlier, in 1932, some activists from that part of the British political spectrum had erected an Anti-War Memorial monument, at Woodford Green, in Essex. Shaped in the form of a bomb, it sarcastically recalled that a British delegate at the League of Nations had spoken against the banning of aerial warfare, on the grounds that Britain needed to bomb rebels on the North-West frontier of India, to keep the "tribesmen in order". The statue bore the ironic inscription, "To those who, in 1932, upheld the right to use bombing planes". After Mussolini had made use of massive bombing in Ethiopia, the monument was re-dedicated, on 21 June 1936, by a Labour Member of Parliament, John Parker MP, in the presence of a representative of the Ethiopian Legation, on 21 June, 1936. Speakers included Sylvia Pankhurst, on whose property the memorial had been erected, and several worthies of the time.. Another consequence of the invasion was that a British woman sculptor, Hilda Seligman, was one of two artists to produce sculptures of Emperor Haile Sellassie. The other was a Romanian. Mrs Seligman's statue, a bust, was subsequently erected in London, at Cannizaro Park, in Wimbledon. It has, in recent years, become a place of pilgrimage for London's Ras Tafarians. Many of them pay homage there, on the former Emperor's official birthday, 23 July.