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Professor Richard Pankhurst, expert on Ethiopia – obituary
Professor Richard Pankhurst, who has died aged 89, was the son of the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and acquired her passion for Ethiopia, publishing numerous books about its history and culture and establishing, in 1962, an Institute for Ethiopian Studies (IES) in the grounds of Haile Selassie I University (now Addis Ababa University).
Pankhurst also played a leading role in a long-running campaign to have artefacts looted from Ethiopia by the European colonial powers returned to their country of origin, a campaign which achieved its most spectacular success in 2005 when Italy returned the Aksum obelisk, a 1,700-year-old, 180 ton carved granite stele that had been hauled away by the Italians in 1937 during Mussolini’s occupation of the country and subsequently re-erected in a busy Rome piazza.
Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst was born on December 3 1927 in Woodford Green, north London, the only child of Sylvia Pankhurst and Silvio Corio, an Italian anarchist with whom Sylvia lived until his death in 1954, but whom she refused to marry out of principle.
In a phrase which had less sinister overtones at the time than it does now, Sylvia, who was 45 when she gave birth, told a reporter from the News Of The World that her child was a “eugenic” baby, because he was born to “two intelligent adults free from hereditary disease and untrammelled by social convention”.
Sylvia was the second of three daughters of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the suffragette movement. By the time Richard was born, however, Sylvia’s determination to pursue her own agenda had led to a cooling of relations with her mother and elder sister Cristabel. Sylvia was less interested in militancy, favouring instead a mass movement for the vote supported by both women and men. In 1914 she established the East London Federation of Suffragettes, which was independent of the Women’s Social and Political Union controlled by her mother and elder sister. She also differed with Emmeline and Cristabel politically. While they drifted to the Right, Sylvia moved to the Left and, after a visit to Italy in 1919, became a vehement anti-fascist.
The fact that Sylvia’s son had been born out of wedlock led Emmeline to break off contact with her daughter entirely. Sylvia and Christabel remained estranged until 1953.
Despite the family rift and the disapproval of some neighbours, Sylvia and Silvio were happy together. While Sylvia wrote and travelled, Silvio did the family cooking and served refreshments at a café. Richard had fond memories of his upbringing, recalling his mother as “very warm but also extremely hard-working – I would often come downstairs in the mornings and find her sitting at the kitchen table writing – and she would have been there all night”. While his upbringing had been unusual, “at the time I just took it for granted because it was the only life I knew.”
Richard was eight when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936. Over the previous year Sylvia, alarmed by Mussolini’s preparations for the invasion, had written letters on the subject to the British and international press, and following the invasion she founded a newspaper, New Times and Ethiopia News, in Ethiopia’s defence. She was to edit it for twenty years.
Richard was educated at Bancroft’s School, Woodford, and, after the war, at the London School of Economics, where he took a doctorate in economic history under Harold Laski. Afterwards he joined the National Institute of Economic and Social Reform.
He had learned much about Ethiopia by reading – and later contributing to – his mother’s newspaper. During the Italian occupation, he met many Ethiopian exiles, including Emperor Haile Selassie, and after the war he befriended Ethiopian students who came to study in London. When in 1956 Sylvia emigrated to Ethiopia at the invitation of Haile Selassie, Richard decided to go with her.
Two years earlier he had met Rita Eldon, the daughter of Jews who had fled Romania in 1936. He invited Rita to join him in Ethiopia and she accepted; they married in 1957. Richard got a job lecturing at the University in Addis Ababa and Rita a job at the National Library of Ethiopia. Sylvia started a new monthly publication, the Ethiopia Observer, which was printed in England, to which Richard contributed articles on the country’s history.
When Sylvia Pankhurst died in 1960 she was given a state funeral in Addis, where her tomb has pride of place in Holy Trinity Cathedral. Richard then took up her mantle, taking over the editorship of the Ethiopia Observer and in 1962 setting up the IES, where he was director until 1972. Afterwards he remained at the university doing research and teaching.
The Pankhursts witnessed the revolutionary upheavals of 1974 which led to the overthrow of Haile Selassie and the coming to power of a ruthless socialist dictatorship, known as the Derg. They left Ethiopia in 1976, although Pankhurst continued to do what he could to support friends who had been detained or imprisoned by the regime. In London he became a research fellow with the School of Oriental and African Studies and the LSE, before working as a librarian at the Royal Asiatic Society.
The Pankhursts returned to Ethiopia in 1986 when Richard resumed research with the IES. He also became Professor of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University where in recent years he led a campaign to raise funds for a new library, to be named the Richard Pankhurst University Library.
His campaign for the return of the Aksum obelisk, which was re-erected amid much fanfare in 2008, earned Pankhurst the honorary title “Dejazmach Benkirew”, bestowed by the Union of Tigraians of North America. Pankhurst also conducted a long-running, though rather less successful, campaign to persuade British cultural institutions to return the Maqdala Treasures, a collection of precious manuscripts and artefacts that had been removed by British troops under Sir Robert Napier during his 1867-68 campaign to punish Emperor Tewodros of Abyssinia for imprisoning the British Consul and several missionaries.
Fifteen elephants and 200 mules carried away treasures, including some from the Church of the Saviour of the World at Maqdala, that were subsequently auctioned off. Estimated to be worth more than £2 billion, they are scattered around various houses and institutions including the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library.
Although some items, mainly from private sources, have made their way back to Ethiopia, the bulk of the treasure remains in Britain.
Pankhurst authored or co-authored more than 20 books on Ethiopia, edited or compiled an additional 17 and published several hundred articles in academic journals. He wrote regularly and extensively for Ethiopian newspapers, edited the Journal of Ethiopian Studies and wrote works on his mother, including Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist and Crusader and Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia.
He was appointed OBE in the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours “for services to Ethiopian studies”.
Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita had two children. His son, Alula (named after Ras Alula, a famous Ethiopian leader), is a social development consultant who has worked as associate professor of anthropology at Addis Ababa University. His daughter Helen, currently CARE International’s senior adviser working in the UK and Ethiopia, had a small role in the film Suffragette (2015), and appeared in costume at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, leading a group of woman dressed as suffragettes.
Professor Richard Pankhurst, born December 3 1927, died February 16 2017