Historically the courts of Ethiopian royalty moved around the length and breadth of Ethiopia as they engaged in defending the nation from insurrection and invasion. Tents therefore, were an indispensable item to serve as shelters until the monarch and his courtiers could return to their built up palaces and castles. Two particular tents which belonged to Emperor Tewodros, are featured in this week’s Pankhurst’s Corner, along with a reminder in this Ethiopian millennium year. That they must be repatriated…
Tents played an important role throughout Ethiopian history. This was no less so during the time of the country’s modernising ruler, Emperor Tewodros (reigned 1855-1868). The French traveler Guillaume Lejean recalls that this remarkable monarch, even when in Gondar, site of so many stone palaces, would have his tents erected – and it was in them that he would give audiences to provincial governors and foreign emissaries alike.
A surprising number of tents were reported during Tewodros’s reign by observers of this period. Some of these artifacts were made in the country, from either local or imported materials, while others were imported ready-made. Tewodros’s chronicler Zanab tells for example of Sayd Pasha of Egypt sending the Emperor a gift of two tents made of muslin, and three of cheaper cloth.
Captain Tristam Speedy, a British traveler of this time, reported that on approaching the then Ethiopian capital, Dabra Tabor, in 1861 he “came in sight of the Royal Camp, and could easily distinguish the King’s bright scarlet tent, surrounded on all sides by the black blanket tents of his subjects”.
Henry Dufton, another British observer of this time, recalls that “the whole length of a broad valley, some five or six miles in extent, was covered with black and white tents, over which on a slight eminence at the centre, presided three coloured silk marquees of the king”. The Englishman, who was received by Tewodros in one of these tents, tells us that another one was reserved for the accommodation of the queen, and was ‘surrounded in an incredibly short space of time with a thick palisade formed of the branches of trees”.
Tents, in Tewodros’s day as previously, played an important role in court ceremonial/ An Ethiopian chronicle states that on the arrival of the British Consul, Captain Cameron, tents and carpets were put out for his reception, while the Protestant missionary Henry Stern tells of an occasion when what he terms “gaudy pavilions” were erected immediately if front of the great Gemb, or palace, at Gondar. Tewodros, we are told, had “a white tent of sovereignty which shone brightly”, while the Abun, or head of the Church, had a “conically-shaped Egyptian tent”. Other tents, made of black wool, were assigned to the Emperor’s European prisoners..
Henry Blanc, a Frenchman in British service, describes one of Tewodros’s tents as being “a beautiful durbar-tent of red and yellow silk”, and tells of “about 2,000 square yards of ground” being “covered with carpets”.
The Napier Expedition
Such tents, dear Reader, much fascinated members of the British Napier expedition on its arrival at Maqdala in April 1868, The Anglo-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley reports that the British soldiers crowded around the Emperor’s silken and canvas tents, each of which was surrounded, as he says, by “a knot of men, commenting, gossiping, pocketing, analysing, breaking into pieces, or tearing into shreds, whatever thing their vision or fancy hit upon”. Prominent among the looters, he adds, were “persons in black coats” – who were none other than the Emperor’s former European captives. Some of them had acquired their share in the loot even before the British troops arrived. “It lay”, Stanley says, “in piles at their feet, or had already been spirited away under their coat-tails”.
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Most of the loot from Maqdala acquired by Napier’s troops was subsequently acquired by the British military authorities, who had it transported by camel and mule to the Dalanta plain. There it was sold at a two-day auction to raise “prize money” for the troops.
Most of the tents disappeared without trace – perhaps because many were appropriated, as we have seen, by the ex-prisoners.
Acquired by the British Museum
Two of Tewodros’s remarkably fine tents were, however, acquired by the British Museum, and duly passed into the possession in London of the Museun of Mankind. These tents are of great interest as being the only known tents dating back to Tewodros’s time.
In the case of these tents, as so often, Ethiopia’s cultural heritage is a closed book to Ethiopians, and is accessible almost exclusively to foreigners – or, if you like, looters.
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The finer of the two tents in London was in all probability the red and yellow “durbar-tent’ earlier described by Henri Blanc. It was, dear Reader, most kindly opened up for me, many years ago, by Dr John Mack, then the museum’s Assistant Curator. That was one of the few occasions that this was ever done since the tent’s arrival in Britain.
This remarkable tent has a maximum height of ten feet, a diameter of ten feet, and walls five feet six inches high. It is composed of a surprising variety of different textiles, all apparently of European origin. Most, to judge by their style, could not have been produced much prior to 1860, and must therefore have been fairly new when looted. A large part of the material is cheap Turkey red, cloth decorated with golden leaves, as manufactured in Scotland and other parts of Europe for markets of the East. There are however, several other types of cloth, including rich green and red furnishings with floral decorations, probably French.
This juxtaposition of common textiles, obtainable in almost any Eastern bazaar, with costly stuffs, which would not have looked out-of-place in a Parisian salon, seems to suggest that the tent was stitched together in Ethiopia from locally obtainable materials without any consideration of their international market value. The tent thus reveals the types of cloth imported in Ethiopia in those days.
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The second of Tewodros’s tents, because of its apparent frailty, has never been erected in living memory; no measurements of it are therefore thus far available.
This tent, which is also a work of considerable interest, is likewise made up of an assortment of brightly coloured strips of cloth, all apparently dating from the last quarter of the 19th century. Most of them seem to be of European origin, and include pieces of dark blue cloth decorated with red, yellow and white flowers, light green fabric with red, white and blue flowers, pale orange-red material with dark red, white and blue flowers, and velvet stuff with black leaves. Some of the material seems, however, of possible Persian origin, and consists of red and white stripes adorned with yellow and black wavy lines,
Both tents, though made up entirely of imported cloth, were almost certainly of Ethiopian handiwork, and the fruit of an age-old – and well-documented – indigenous Ethiopian tradition of tent-making, which can be shown to back at least to the Middle Ages.
These two tents would seem eminently suitable to qualify for repatriation in Ethiopia’s Millennium Year. Once repatriated they could be finally re-erected, under appropriate museum conditions, for all to see.
(Originally published in Capital newspaper)
Richard Pankhurst 
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