Along Mission Road to Ethiopia and human rights

Padma Edirisinghe

Very often on my outings I pass the name board Mission Road. The junction exhibiting the name board is known as Bangala Handiya or Bungalow junction. Whose bungalow it is, I have yet to find out but it certainly leads to two foremost colleges in the area. One college is now split into two, boys and girls.

It earned fame in the early British period as the first English school. During that time the area would have been all forest and marshy land, the Diyawanna running pell-mell. Why should the Suddhas go out of their way to put up such an institution in such an obscure area?

The explanation could be that there was already a Schola or Escole in the area, a premier one with its roots going back as far as the Portuguese period. During that period Kotte was the epicentre of their power after Don Juan Dharmapala began his puppet regime as a Ferenghi nominee.

Subsequent to the fierce onslaughts of King Mayadunne and Tikiri Rajasinghe they withdrew to Colombo and many an edifice put up by them too went into obscurity along with the ancient ruins. The Dutch may have converted it into a Parish school.

A self-made scholar of the area, now deceased, agreed with my conclusions adding that laying foundations was the most difficult part of a building construction and any subsequent builder in the old times once they destroyed the earlier building never removed the foundations but went on to build the new edifice on it or converted the old building to be used for their own purposes.

Thus many a church was put up on the building site of an old temple or kovil during the colonial era. Then he went on to give me news about a curious episode staged in this school.

A widow of a Kandyan chieftain who was beheaded by the British for treachery, instead of vowing vengeance on them had made a request to them that in return for making her son fatherless that they take over and educate him and make him a learned gentleman.

Perhaps far ahead of the times she could foresee that the language of the race who killed her husband was one day going to end up global. Her request was granted and he was boarded in this Christian College. So far, so good.

But the poor boy cared least for this new language foisted on him nor for the education imparted flavoured with X ‘tian scriptures. Languishing in the school hostel amidst a strange student crowd, the poor child yearned for his emerald mountains, for the cascading waterfalls, the freedom to jabbar in his own tongue and for the warmth of his mother’s arms.

Pining for these for months he developed a fever and passed on to heaven and never to any University in England as his fond mother would have envisaged.

This poignant story should end here but for the face that the writer came across a stray story about an Ethiopian boy who shared a similar fate. This is how it runs. The boy was a prince with a lineage running to king Solomon and the queen of Sheba.

He was also the son of the Ethiopian emperor, Tewedros 11, heir to one of Africa’s richest royal dynasties. But somewhere in the 1860s when the British were dreaming of ruling the whole world, after the fashion of king Alexander and Julius Caesar, followed by a three day fierce battle without any provocation except the colonial greed, the emperor’s mountain top place at Maqdala was ramsacked by them.

Then the king and queen were killed before the boy’s very eyes and the orphaned prince named Alemayehu was carried away to India and then to England to rid the natives rebelling against the invaders under his banner. Well, there were no human rights commissions then.

Perhaps the Kandyan boy in the Christian College along the Mission Road would have written epistles to his mother asking her to take him home, epistles that may have or not have reached her in those days of difficult communication and transport.

Alamaheyu of course had no parents to write to but he had made requests to the British Government to return him home despite the educational opportunities they were offering. Ethiopian nostalgia for one’s own homeland and for familiar landscapes and haunts with their own fragrant memories can be bad as ours.

He began to pine for his motherland. Then he developed a sickness perhaps generated by the freezing cold of London and his loneliness in a strange country. And at the mere age of 18 years he was dead and gone.

Honour was accorded to the royal prince after his death however by burying him in a crypt besides St. George’s Chapel at Windsor castle.

He was probably baptized while in England. Even the queen, Queen Victoria, had felt sorry for the boy and is said to have remarked that he was “such a sweet boy who hardly looked a nigger”. Cannot Niggers or Negroes or African Americans look sweet? Perhaps they can, especially when they are on a hot race to the White House and almost near the winning post.

Does the story end here too? No. Ethiopia is a country with a very rich civilisation. On September 12, last year, according to the news item I read was to fall their millennium. And for this they were demanding that the prince’s remains be exhumed and returned to Ethiopia.

I have not followed the incidents to ascertain whether this request was granted. But at least professor of Ethiopian studies, who happens to be the son of universal suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst has this to write.

“It was such a tragic and short life. The boy saw his parents die, he was taken away from his home to the intense cold of England and the Government refused his requests to return him home”.

Today as one listens to speeches delivered by European political gurus on the anti-democratic activities of Asian countries trying to grapple with the demonic contingents of terrorists one wonders on the speed with which they have forgotten their own past brimming with such atrocious activities.