1 - Exhuming the Narrative: Imagining Prince Alemayehu in the Ethiopian Diaspora

Summary

Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed—not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past?

Stuart Hall

Confronted with erasures and distortions of their past, Black diaspora communities seek to recuperate and retell collective histories in service of a shared present and legible future. However, as Stuart Hall posited in 1990, such recuperation is not a mere “unearthing,” but a recreation of history that produces and is produced by collective identity. Diasporic identity does not stand apart from the signs and stories that seek to represent it but is formed by those very evocations of the past. This process is less concerned with a singular position of truth (though it may be corrective of common distortions) or a location of origin (though it may hold a real or imagined site of reference). Instead, diaspora rearchives history by dynamically engaging both its emotional resonances and extant power structures.

An especially powerful genre of historical narrative employed to produce collective identity is biography. The story of a life can be made to represent a people or scaled down to the unit of the individual, in all its specificities and contexts. What then, must we do with the story of a life, in the words of poet Lemn Sissay, “that's not happened”? What power exists in the biography of a child, for example, who has been made famous for historical occurrences not of his own doing? In the Ethiopian diaspora, one such life has long animated the imagination of writers and storytellers: Prince Alemayehu, son of Emperor Tewodros II (1855–68). Current debates about inter-country adoption, repatriation, and the diaspora's terms for migration and displacement are negotiated across the worlds Alemayehu reached beyond his own volition.

In March 2019, the director of London's National Army Museum handed two locks of Emperor Tewodros's hair to Ethiopian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Hirut Kassaw. The hair was taken in the wake of the Battle of Maqdala (1868)—one of Britain's most expensive military expeditions in the nineteenth century—along with over three hundred and fifty manuscripts, dozens of royal treasures, and the emperor's son, Alemayehu.