The descendants of a hero of Ethiopia’s resistance against European imperialism are seeking to retrieve a gold medal taken from him by Italian troops, after the artefact’s current holder failed to sell it at an online auction earlier this month.
The solid gold Imperial Order of the Star of Ethiopia used to be in the possession of Ras Desta Damtew, a son-in-law of Emperor Haile Selassie and a guerrilla army commander whose capture and execution in 1937 spelled the end of Ethiopia’s resistance to fascist Italy’s occupation.
Its whereabouts were unknown until this November, when the star-shaped brooch resurfaced on the online platform LiveAuctioneers, where it was offered for sale for an estimated €60,000-90,000 (£50,000-£74,000) by the Lausanne-registered company La Galerie Numismatique.
The website’s listing did not hide the item’s controversial provenance, describing it as coming “from the estate of an Italian soldier who was present at the capture of the prince [Desta Damtew]”.
“My first feeling was anger that they were so blatantly claiming to have taken it from someone who was executed,” said Laly Kassa, one of Desta Damtew’s granddaughters. “This one was so egregious that we just felt like as a family, we had to prove something.”
The family’s lawyer Chris Marinello, an art restitution expert and founder of Art Recovery International, is working for them pro bono. They say said that when Marinello approached La Galerie Numismatique, it initially rebuffed the restitution request, offering to sell the medal for €61,595, including a buyer’s premium and VAT.
At the auction on 1 December, the brooch failed to meet the minimum price required for a winning bid, however, and its current owner, a British collector of military memorabilia based in Spain, has since entered direct talks with the legal representative of Damtew’s family. La Galerie Numismatique did not respond when approached for a comment.
What makes the medal especially significant, according to James De Lorenzi, an associate history professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is that its removal from Ethiopia can be directly connected to an alleged war crime.
Damtew, who decided to fight the Italian invasion while Selassie fled the country in 1936 to go into exile in England, was captured on 24 February 1937 after a skirmish near Mount Gurage and then executed by a group of Ethiopian fighters commanded by Italian officers.
In 1948, the Ethiopian government charged 10 Italian citizens before the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), submitting affidavits describing Damtew’s killing after his capture, when he was a prisoner of war. This evidence led the UNWCC to rule that the 10 Italians were either accused or suspected war criminals.
“The medal was thus obtained by an agent of the fascist regime who was directly involved in this war crime, amid a broader counterinsurgency that involved mass killings, sexual violence, torture, and arbitrary detention,” said De Lorenzi. “Given this provenance, returning the medal to Ethiopia is the only responsible choice.”
While the Imperial Order of the Star of Ethiopia would not be the first precious artefact to be returned to east Africa in recent years, it will probably generate fresh interest in the whereabouts of items looted during the Italian occupation of what was also known as Abyssinia, between 1935 and 1941.
Article 37 of the Paris peace treaties of 1947 stipulated that Italy should within 18 months “restore all Ethiopian works of art, religious objects, archives, and objects of historical value removed from Ethiopia to Italy since October 3, 1935”. But with the exception of the Italian state’s 2005 return of a 1,700-year-old granite monument known as the Axum obelisk, Italian institutions and individuals have mostly failed to follow up on the requirement.
Ras – a royal title roughly equivalent to “duke” – Desta Damtew was a member of the aristocracy that ruled the Ethiopian empire from the middle ages. Royal rule of the country in the Horn of Africa was marked by stark economic inequalities, which fuelled the coup d’etat that toppled the monarchy in 1974.
Damtew’s granddaughter Laly Kassa said his descendants were “unequivocal” that the medal would not be privately held in the event of a restitution. “If we can get the medal back, it will go to a museum,” she said. “We want it on permanent display at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.”
In spite of his royal ties, Desta Damtew was honoured as an icon of African resistance to colonialism even in the socialist People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, and by black solidarity movements across the globe.
Italy first tried to claim Abyssinia as a protectorate in the late 19th century but was defeated emphatically by Ethiopian forces: Damtew’s father, Fitawrari Damtew Ketena, fell in the climactic battle of Adwa in March 1896, which came to be remembered as a defining moment of African defiance.
In 1935, however, Ethiopia became what US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy adviser Sumner Welles called “the first victim of Axis aggression”, when Italy invaded from neighbouring Eritrea.
