Abstract
The focus of this paper is the question of whether the return of the crown and the stool of Kafa from Switzerland to Ethiopia in 1954 is a “ case of restitution”. The circumstances of this return and the reasons why the crown and the stool are quali ed as “ restituted items” in the Institute of Ethiopian Studies are to be discussed. The story of the crown starts in the year 1897, when Emperor Menelik II conquered the kingdom of Kafa in South -West Ethiopia and came into possession of the crown of the king of Kafa. Because Menelik feared that the crown could be stolen and taken back to Kafa, he asked his Swiss adviser, the engineer Alfred Ilg, to make sure that the crown would be taken out of the country. When Emperor Haile Selassie I visited Switzerland in 1954, members of the Ilg family handed the crown over to him and he took it back to Ethiopia. Is this repatriation a case of restitution according to the “ Unesco Convention 1970 ” or the “ Unidroit Convention 1995 ” ? How should we understand the repatriation of the crown compared to, for example, the restitution of the stele of Aksumin 2008 ? These questions are of interest for museum curators dealing with similar cases. The case of the crown of Kafa however seems to be a very singular one.
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