The Guardian by Isabel Hilton 21 February 2002

Many museums are returning their ill-gotten gains. Why can't the British Museum do the same for Ethiopia?

The Emperor Tewodros II, who ruled what is now Ethiopia in the 19th century, was by the standards of his day an enlightened figure: he was keen on roads, he abolished slavery, he carried out land reform. He did, however, make one mistake that was to prove fatal. He imprisoned some western missionaries and diplomats to try to force the British to give him technical support to build new artillery, in order to defend himself against a feared Egyptian invasion.

Perhaps the emperor was simply trying to get Queen Victoria's attention. The British responded with a military expedition that ended with the fall of Tewodros's mountain capital, Maqdala, in 1868. The emperor committed suicide rather than be captured.

The British troops celebrated their victory by ripping off the dead emperor's clothes, then looting his city, in particular the treasures of its churches. Altogether, they required 15 elephants and 200 mules to haul away the hoard of illuminated manuscripts, gold and silver crosses, vestments and so on.

The episode was regarded in Britain as shameful. Even Lord Napier, who commanded the expedition, felt on reflection that the goods should be returned. Earlier this month, only 133 years later, a small part of it was. The object that was returned was a tabot, a carved wooden tablet that is held to be a replica of the Ark of the Covenant.

Tabots occupy a central role in church ritual: most churches have one and they are regarded as sacred objects that only the priests are permitted to see. This tabot was discovered in December in a cupboard, when the Rev John McLuckie of St John's Church in Edinburgh was clearing out. Mr McLuckie had no doubt that it should be returned, and his church authorities agreed. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out on the streets of Addis Ababa to welcome it back.

A story with a happy ending, then, but only up to a point. There are many more tabots from the Maqdala loot, as well as documents, chalices and other sacred objects. The British Museum alone has 10 tabots, none of which is displayed.

Mr McLuckie, like the Ethiopian government, is rather hoping that the British Museum will follow his example. So far, though, there has been a stern silence from Bloomsbury. All requests for the return of objects acquired under circumstances that were regarded as morally suspect at the time have been met with a blank refusal.

The British Museum's position looks increasingly anachronistic. For more than a decade now, museums elsewhere in Britain have been coughing up items the possession of which they cannot defend. It began with the least defensible relics of the Victorian passion for taxonomy - the bits and pieces of human beings, skulls, thigh bones, pudenda, that were accumulated by British travellers and explorers in pursuit of "scientific" inquiry. When indigenous peoples from Australia to North America began to point out that such relics were bits of their ancestors that should be returned and buried, many museum curators were inclined to agree.

As with human remains, so with many artefacts. There has been a recognition that, as long as institutions hang on to objects, they are failing to disown the attitudes that sanctioned their collection. If we no longer believe that the shape of a man's skull is a measure of his intelligence and his place in the chain of being, what are we doing with his skull in our cupboard?

The great museums, of course, argue that such a process would be hard to stop, once started. But this is more than a fight about things. It is also a fight about how such objects are viewed and understood and, through them, how we view our own history and the history of others.

For native peoples, the reclamation of the bones is part of an attempt to repair the damage colonisation did to their societies and culture. (The traditions that are recreated may be criticised as reinventions, but who are the British, after all, whose age-old state rituals were cobbled together in the 19th century, to complain about invented traditions?)

Ethiopia is a poor country, but one with a powerful culture and vibrant religion. As the rejoicing earlier this month demonstrated, the tabots are a living part of those traditions. Their absence is keenly felt and the injustice of their loss resented. They have no scientific value and, since they are not displayed, the British Museum can hardly argue, as it does in the case of the Parthenon (formerly Elgin) marbles, that millions of visitors from all over the world can view them and gain from the experience.

If the British Museum is the repository of what is best in our own traditions of culture and scholarship, surely it is time to acknowledge the looting of Maqdala as a shameful episode and to disgorge the loot? The British Museum might even feel better for it. Certainly the people of Ethiopia would.