POLITICS
From Magdala to Southwark Crown Court
FERDINAND MOUNT
According to its masthead, the Voice is 'Britain's Best Black Newspaper'. The front-page story in last week's edition was not about the riot in Tottenham. It was not about riots at all. 'RASTAS OUTRAGED AT JAILING' had nothing to do with petrol bombs or machetes. The story was about the sentence of nine months' imprisonment meted out to Seymour McClean who was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of stealing — or 'liberating' — over 3,000 books and manuscripts from the British Museum, the School of Oriental and Afri- can Studies and the Foreign Office and Lambeth libraries. These were said to be part of the booty stolen by the British from Ethiopia in the Magdala Expedition of 1868 — and so, in the Rasta view, part of the heritage of black people everywhere, since Ethiopia is the spiritual home for Rastafarians.
By a fascinating coincidence, in last week's Spectator Charles Glass (Not send- ing a gunboat') contrasted the brilliant military success of Lord Napier's expedi- tion to Magdala to liberate the 'chained consul', Charles Cameron, and 30 other Europeans from the Emperor Theodore's clutches with the helplessness of the great powers of today to deal with foreign warlords who kidnap their subjects, not- ably the failure of the Americans in the Lebanon to free their hostages. These two reverberations from this extraordinary drama of imperial high noon prompt me to offer some more sidelights and reflections from the Magdala story.
It was a terrific media event. The Times, the Standard, the Morning Post, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph, the Saturday Review, the Illustrated London News and the Times of India all sent correspondents; and the legendary H. M. Stanley came for the New York Herald. There was also a geographer, Clements Markham, 40 years later the crusty doyen of the Royal Geo- graphical Society who selected Robert Falcon Scott for the Antarctic Expedition; and an archaeologist, Mr Holmes, from the British Museum.
Everyone was in high spirits throughout. Markham wrote in his book on the expedi- tion: 'Active service for her sons is essen- tial to a nation's healthful existence . . . . To England, therefore, an Abyssinian ex- pedition was an unmixed good. Active work in the field, where alone self- reliance, experience, presence of mind, resource and efficiency can be acquired, was furnished to her officers in both services; while some much needed self- respect was restored to the nation itself. The cause of quarrel was absolutely just, and comparatively little suffering or misery was brought upon the invaded country.' Stanley in his book called it 'this last, this best, this greatest of victories'. The rescue of the consul and the other Europeans, quite unharmed, was a 'Modern cru- sade . . . to be remembered of all men in all lands, among the most wonderfully successful campaigns ever conducted in history.' Disraeli boasted that 'the stan- dard of St George was hoisted on the mountains of Rasselas' — which caused a certain amount of mirth, since even in the afterglow of victory the sense of the ridicu- lous had not been totally lost. And the myth of Magdala became firmly entren- ched. Ethiopia had been subdued. Some huge but unspecified menace had been averted.
And Mr Holmes of the British Museum did best of all. A few days after Napier's force had burnt Magdala to the ground and thoroughly looted the treasury, there was an open-air auction held in the canton- ment. The trophies covered half an acre of ground; glittering under the desert sun, there were chalices, goblets, crosses, shields, carpets, illuminated bibles, manu- scripts, silks, saddles. Mr Holmes secured the best items.
True, there were a few spoilsports. Gladstone thundered against the sacrileg- ious treatment of objects connected with religious worship. The House of Commons Select Committee was not best pleased to discover that the expedition had cost £9 million, instead of the £4 million Disraeli had forecast. But Disraeli thought the price worth paying. And when Napier died in 1890, his funeral was the most spectacu- lar since Wellington's.
Yet what, when all was said and done, had the Emperor Theodore (who was only a jumped-up brigand whose real name was Kasa) really wanted? A little bit of recogni- tion from the Great White Queen, to put it at its lowest; more precisely, an answer to his letter suggesting an embassy to Eng- land. Even the enthusiastic Stanley was compelled to admit: 'The letter arrived in England safely in February, 1863; was received by Earl Russell, opened, read, thrown upon the table, docketed, and in the pigeon-hole it rested' — for more than a year. Only the news that the impatient Theodore had actually chained the consul provoked Russell to minute: 'Is there any letter from the King of Abyssinia un- answered?' Even this minute was returned unanswered from the India Office.
Kasa was one of those cut-price dictators now familiar to us — a mixture of brutality and piety, of paranoia and good intentions, simultaneously afraid of and entranced by technology. He wanted not only modern weapons, and gunsmiths and ironcasters to produce them, but also civil engineers, teachers and artisans to modernise his country. Alas, the only weapons that came were Napier's Snider rifles (used for the first time at Magdala) which mowed down 800 of his men. The British lost two men.
The Emperor could not understand why Britain and France were so negligent to- ward him: 'Really I do not know what is the matter with my cousins Napoleon and Victoria that they send me such creatures: the Frenchman is a wicked fellow and the Englishman an ass. Is it because I am black and poor that I am despised?' Why would they not help to modernise Ethiopia?
There are all sorts of echoes here . . • General Amin . General Galtieri . • Bernie Grant. And again and again, an abyss of incomprehension. On the one side, complaints of slights, of lack of courtesy, of racism. On the other, a horror at the infringement of human rights, and a baffled resentment at the refusal of lesser breeds to recognise the law. Civil morality can be enforced by technological superior- ity, but cannot be taught that way, certain- ly not when inflated by media hype and stained by looting. Such humbug has a way of coming back to haunt posterity.
How self-indulgent most British people still are in forming their views of the Empire: on the Right, pretending that it was all about the rule of law and tropical medicine and that plunder never came into it; on the Left, pretending that it was all plunder and no sacrifice. For us too, the Empire is a sort of phantom kingdom of the mind, just as Haile Selassie's Ethiopia is for Rastas, a place for projecting fanta- sies, Prester John's realm, an escape from the difficulties of real life. The imperial instinct lives on, in a perverted sort of way, in the ILEA, where the new raj tries just as hard to educate its pupils to be discon- tented as the old raj tried to educate them to be content with their lot. Their victims are lost in a forest of double standards and signposts which have been tampered with. And some of them take a terrible revenge on the modern world for refusing to answer their letters.
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