Gajec Exhibits

The Shield of Magdala, an artifact of tremendous cultural significance that was looted by British troops during the Expedition to Abyssinia, is set to be returned to its home country of Ethiopia. Stolen following the 1868 Battle of Magdala, which saw the mountain fortress of Emperor Tewodros II captured and hundreds of treasures, including the emperor’s crown, stolen by British forces, the shield had been scheduled to be publicly auctioned this past Februrary by UK auction house Anderson and Garland. Instead, the auction house pulled it from sale under duress from the Ethiopian government and negotiated its repatriation with the Royal Ethiopian Trust (RET), a nonprofit established by Prince Ermias Sahle-Selassie Haile-Selassie, grandson of Emperor Haile-Selassie I, to preserve and promote Ethiopia’s culture and economy.

Italy had colonies in Africa since the end of the last century, both on its northern coast and in the east of the continent, bordering the Ethiopian Empire, the only black state that had retained real sovereignty at that time. Earlier, the Italians, having just acquired their first African possessions, had already tried to subjugate Ethiopia (Abyssinia), not considering it a full-fledged state, but then the people of this country were able to defend their independence. The inability of Italy, in whose heart the greatest state in the history of mankind had once been born, which became the vector of development of the entire European civilization, to subdue the technologically lagging Africans, was a great national trauma for the Italians. And Mussolini, as the leader of his people, was firm in his intention to wash away this stain of shame.

considered the main goal of the Italian kingdom to be undisputed dominance in the Mediterranean, similar to what the Roman Empire once had. Having overcome the ideas of disarmament, the power of the Italian army and navy steadily increased, and with it the determination to act.

In Sidist Kilo, Addis Ababa, sits a towering monument bearing somber witness to Ethiopia’s darkest days. Known as the Yekatit 12 Square Memorial, the towering obelisk commemorates the 1937 massacre of over 30,000 innocent Ethiopians by Italian fascist forces in retaliation for an assassination attempt on the brutal Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani.

For three agonizing days in February of that year, the Italians led a campaign of indiscriminate violence in retaliation for the assassination attempt. Dubbed the “Butcher of Fezzan”for his brutality in Libya, Graziani was determined to inflict terror on the civilian population of Addis Ababa.

Despite the obvious advantage of the well-trained Italians, the Ethiopians were not going to capitulate, sometimes throwing themselves into hand-to-hand combat against machine guns and tanks, so the war promised to be protracted from the very beginning. The Italian army at that time was considered one of the strongest in the world, so its inability to break the resistance would be another disgrace to the reputation of the entire state, which was unacceptable for the Duce. Wanting to end the extremely costly campaign as soon as possible, the Italians decided to actively use chemical weapons, despite the ban provided for by the Geneva Protocol of 1925, because of which soon over a hundred thousand soldiers would die from suffocation, as well as civilians convicted of disloyalty to the invaders.

"Do not the peoples of the world realize that in struggling to the bitter end I am not only fulfilling my sacred duty to my people, but also guarding the last citadel of collective security? Are they so blind that they do not see that I bear responsibility to all mankind?"

- from an address by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, April 29, 1936.