Achamyeleh Debela, PhD
Chair Executive Board
Global Alliance for Justice: The Ethiopian Cause
September 8, 2026
1. Introduction: Plunder at the Negotiating Table
In September 2026, two parallel spectacles illustrated the fractured state of global cultural heritage governance:
- In the commercial antiquities sphere, an 18th-century illuminated Royal Gospel manuscript from the court of Gondar—plundered directly from Emperor Tewodros II at the 1868 sacking of Maqdala by British forces—surfaced on the commercial market (Inlibris, BN#69353) with an explicit provenance tracing its lineage through Lord Napier.
- Simultaneously, in the institutional sphere, the Toledo Museum of Art announced a negotiated tripartite accord with private collector Robert McCarthy Jr. and the Ethiopian Heritage Authority to sort through a collection of 380 Ethiopian antiquities, returning items deemed illicit while retaining others and using public-private acquisition funds to partially compensate the collector.
These occurrences are not isolated anomalies; they represent the structural mechanics of modern cultural property circulation. For decades, thousands of sacred, imperial, and communal artifacts—pillaged through colonial expeditions, illicit excavations, or porous borders—vanished into opaque Western private vaults. Today, those same private collections emerge into the open, sitting across negotiating tables from sovereign states whose heritage was dispossessed.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ORIGINAL THEFT / COLONIAL EXPEDITION (1868) │
└────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Private Western Circulation & Market Trading │
│ (Dealers, Elite Collectors, Unvetted Auctions) │
└────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
│
┌───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┐
▼ ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ COMMERCIAL COMMODIFICATION │ │ INSTITUTIONAL LAUNDERING │
│ Open Sale / Auction Exploiting │ │ Partial Donation/Sale to Museum │
│ Jurisdictional Loopholes │ │ with State Negotiated Access │
│ (e.g., Inlibris BN#69353) │ │ (e.g., Toledo / McCarthy Model) │
└────────────────┬────────────────┘ └────────────────┬────────────────┘
│ │
└───────────────────────┬───────────────────────┘
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE COMPROMISED STATE NEGOTIATING TABLE │
│ (Sovereignty vs. Realpolitik of Recovery) │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
When private collectors present looted heritage to states under the banner of “philanthropy” or “collaborative stewardship,” they force source nations into an ethical bind: accept compromise (such as shared custody, partial repurchasing, or decades-long joint provenance investigations) or risk seeing their ancestral heritage disappear back into private collections.
This dynamic raises critical legal, ethical, and human questions:
- Where do the frameworks for retributive and restorative justice reside globally and locally?
- What legal, civic, and institutional actors must intercede?
- What is the cumulative, irreversible price paid by a generation deprived of its own civilizational memory?
2. The Anatomy of Compromise: Private Ownership vs. Inalienable Sovereignty
2.1 The “Orphaned Artifact” and Provenance Laundering
The international art market frequently relies on sanitizing euphemisms. Collections assembled during the late 20th century without documentation are often classified as “orphaned artifacts” or possessing “slim records.” These designations obscure historical realities: objects do not orphan themselves. In the case of Ethiopian sacred codices, processional crosses, and Tabots (consecrated altar tablets), every piece was severed from an active liturgical community, an imperial repository, or an archaeological site through violence, theft, or illicit export.
When private collectors negotiate with museums and source nations, they leverage structural advantages:
| Mechanism | Operational Method | Ethical and Legal Consequence |
| Partial Gift / Partial Sale | Collector donates a fraction (securing substantial tax deductions) while selling the remainder at market rate. | Public funds and source communities indirectly subsidize the acquisition of illicitly acquired goods. |
| Bilateral Stewardship Agreements | Museum and source nation co-curate while provenance is evaluated over decades (e.g., Toledo/McCarthy). | Pragmatically secures repatriations, but legitimizes the retention of unverified items in Western institutions during research. |
| Long-Term Loan Accords | State ownership is recognized on paper, but artifacts remain on extended display abroad (e.g., Met/Stern Cycladic model). | Western institutions preserve cultural capital and foot traffic; source populations remain physically separated from their heritage. |
2.2 The Commercial Front: Defying Repatriation Norms
While institutional negotiations attempt to construct ethical compromises, the unmoderated commercial market operates with open defiance. The public sale of the 18th-century Maqdala Gospels (Inlibris BN#69353) proves that the explicit lineage of colonial loot is still treated as an attractive marketing asset rather than grounds for immediate seizure.
To describe an illuminated Ge’ez Gospel commissioned at Gondar and seized by Robert Napier in 1868 as an antiquarian prize is to treat wartime plunder as a legitimate chain of custody. The market leverages the private-law protections of civil-code jurisdictions (such as Austria, Switzerland, and Germany), where “good faith” acquisition doctrines and narrow statutes of limitations shield possessors of looted goods from external claims.
3. The Global and Local Loci of Justice
Justice for cultural dispossession operates on two distinct planes: retributive justice (holding perpetrators, dealers, and enablers accountable) and restorative justice (the unconditional return of heritage and repair of cultural harm).
LOCI OF HERITAGE JUSTICE
┌────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ GLOBAL MECHANISMS │ LOCAL MECHANISMS │
├────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • 1970 UNESCO Convention │ • National Patrimony Laws │
│ (Non-retroactive baseline) │ (e.g., Ethiopian Proc. No. 209/2000) │
│ │ │
│ • 1995 UNIDROIT Convention │ • Strategic Criminal Asset Forfeiture │
│ (Burden of proof on purchaser) │ (e.g., Manhattan DA Model) │
│ │ │
│ • UNDRIP (Articles 11 & 12) │ • Ecclesiastical and Customary Courts │
│ (Indigenous and spiritual rights) │ (EOTC Canonical Inalienability) │
│ │ │
│ • International Human Rights Frameworks│ • Civil Replevin Actions in Foreign │
│ (Right to culture and identity) │ Jurisdictions │
└────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────┘
3.1 The Global Architecture and Its Limitations
- The 1970 UNESCO Convention: While the foundational international treaty against cultural property trafficking, its structural limitation is its prospective application. It does not apply retroactively to colonial looting (such as Maqdala in 1868) and relies heavily on state enforcement that is frequently undermined by weak customs oversight.
- The 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects: A more stringent legal instrument that places the burden of proof on the possessor to demonstrate due diligence at the time of acquisition. However, many major market nations have systematically refused to ratify it to protect their domestic art markets.
- The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP): Articles 11 and 12 mandate that states provide redress, including restitution, for cultural and religious property taken without free, prior, and informed consent. This provides a strong normative basis for challenging the retention of sacred objects like the Ethiopian Tabot.
3.2 Local Sovereignty and Jurisprudential Enforcement
- Domestic Patrimony Legislation: Ethiopia’s Proclamation No. 209/2000 (Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage) establishes that cultural heritage is public and ecclesiastical property that cannot be alienated, transferred, or privatized.
- The Model of Criminal Asset Forfeiture: The aggressive application of domestic criminal law—exemplified by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office—demonstrates that when domestic law enforcement treats stolen artifacts as stolen property rather than diplomatic curiosities, private collections can be seized and repatriated without financial compensation to collectors.
- Ecclesiastical Jurisprudence: The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church maintains that consecrated items, especially manuscripts and Tabots, possess an ontological status that cannot be reduced to personal property. They are communal covenantal instruments incapable of secular commercial alienation.
4. Who and What Must Intercede?
Ending the cycle of private commercialization and negotiated concessions requires coordinated intervention across legal, civic, and technological domains.
COORDINATED INTERVENTION FRAMEWORK
│
┌─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
STATE & LEGISLATIVE CIVIL SOCIETY & DIASPORA TECHNOLOGICAL & FORENSIC
• Universal Provenance Acts • AFROMET & Activist Coalitions • Open-Access Provenance DBs
• Anti-Money Laundering Regs • Global Academic Boycotts • AI Stylistic Fingerprinting
• Elimination of Tax Relief • Direct Diplomatic Litigation • Blockchain Chain-of-Custody
4.1 Legislative and Judicial Interventions
- Elimination of Tax Subsidies for Looted Donations: National legislatures must revise tax codes to explicitly deny tax deductions or charitable write-offs for any cultural donations lacking unbroken, pre-export provenance verified by the source nation.
- Universal Application of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Rules: Regulating private antiquarian book and art dealers under rigorous AML and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) frameworks removes the anonymity that enables private sales like those on the European antiquarian market.
- Specialized Restitution Tribunals: Independent international arbitration bodies must be established to adjudicate claims based on historical equity rather than the narrow statutes of limitations favored by commercial jurisdictions.
4.2 Civic, Diaspora, and Institutional Intercessors
- Diaspora Advocacy Networks: Organizations such as the Association for the Return of The Maqdala Ethiopian Treasures (AFROMET) have demonstrated the power of public scholarship and continuous civic pressure in forcing institutions to deaccession looted items.
- Academic and Curatorial Non-Cooperation: Western curators and scholars must refuse to authenticate, evaluate, or publish privately held manuscripts that lack verified legal provenance. Denying scholarly legitimacy directly reduces the speculative market value of looted artifacts.
5. The Price of a Deprived Generation
When estimating the damage of cultural dispossession, the conversation is too often confined to market valuations and physical objects. The true cost is structural, psychological, and generational.
THE CASCADE OF CULTURAL DEPRIVATION
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1. EPISTEMICIDE │
│ Systematic destruction of indigenous knowledge systems and the physical │
│ severing of a society from its ancestral intellectual achievements. │
└────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 2. PEDAGOGICAL ALIENATION │
│ Generations of youth educated through foreign archives; native scholars must │
│ beg foreign institutions for digital access to their own heritage. │
└────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 3. SPIRITUAL AND ONTOLOGICAL DISLOCATION │
│ Sacred liturgical instruments transformed into dead aesthetic commodities; │
│ rupture of continuous communal worship and ancestral veneration. │
└────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 4. MATERIAL UNDERDEVELOPMENT │
│ Deprivation of cultural tourism, specialized conservation economies, and │
│ scholarly infrastructure within the country of origin. │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
5.1 Epistemicide and the Loss of Pedagogical Continuity
As scholars like Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Felwine Sarr, and Bénédicte Savoy have noted, the removal of cultural heritage is an act of epistemicide—the systematic crippling of a society’s capacity to generate knowledge on its own terms.
When the Second Gondarine Gospel Book was stripped from Maqdala, Ethiopian theologians, scribes, and artists lost the primary physical reference point for 18th-century narrative illumination, script evolution, and binding craft.
Generations of Ethiopian students have grown up learning about their ancestors’ creative and intellectual achievements through the lens of European academic publications, forced to consult digitized scans hosted by foreign servers while the physical codices sit behind climate-controlled glass in London, Munich, or private safes in Vienna.
5.2 The Psychological Toll of Cultural Subjugation
Denying a people access to their historical triumphs leaves a vacuum often filled by colonial narratives of perceived historical deficiency. When children are separated from the tangible evidence of their ancestors’ scientific, artistic, and theological mastery, they are subjected to an ongoing form of psychological violence. The message broadcast by Western retention is clear: You may have created it, but only we are civilized enough to preserve and appreciate it.
5.3 Quantifying the Reparations Debt
True justice cannot be achieved merely through the return of the physical objects. The financial debt owed to the source nations includes:
- Compensatory Reparations: Decades of commercial profits, exhibition revenues, and academic prestige extracted by Western institutions and private dealers using looted material.
- Infrastructural Investment: Direct funding from the plundering states to build state-of-the-art conservation centers, digital archives, and educational institutes managed by native institutions, such as the Ethiopian Heritage Authority and the National Archives and Library of Ethiopia.
6. Conclusion: Beyond Transactional Diplomacy
The ongoing trade in colonial loot and the delicate diplomatic accommodations made for private collections represent a critical challenge to international cultural integrity. Allowing collectors to negotiate partial sales, tax write-offs, and prolonged loan arrangements over items obtained through colonial violence perpetuates the very asymmetries that enabled the initial plunder.
The road forward requires abandoning the myth of the “universal collector” and replacing it with the principle of unconditional restitution:
- All private commercial offerings of items linked to colonial expeditions—such as the Napier sacking of Maqdala—must be halted and subjected to immediate legal intervention.
- Institutions entering negotiations with private collectors must refuse financial buyouts for unprovenanced or illicitly acquired items, acting solely as conduits for full repatriation to the country of origin.
- Reparations must be paid to rebuild the cultural, academic, and archival ecosystems that were systematically dismantled by generations of dispossession.
Justice will not be found in quiet compromises behind closed doors. It will be realized only when the sacred icons, royal codices, and liturgical treasures return unconditionally to the people and soil that gave them life—restoring to present and future generations their rightful inheritance.
Key References and Scholarly Context
- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. (Critiqued for universalist stewardship paradigms).
- De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge, 2014.
- Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Pluto Press, 2020.
- Pankhurst, Richard. “The Napier Expedition and the Loot from Maqdala.” African Affairs, vol. 84, no. 336, 1985, pp. 411–440.
- Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. French Ministry of Culture / Seuil, 2018.
- UNESCO. Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Paris, 1970.
- UNIDROIT. Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects. Rome, 1995.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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