Two locks of hair belonging to widely revered Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros will be repatriated after a request from Addis Ababa, the National Army Museum in Britain announced Monday, as more African countries seek to reclaim heritage they say was taken decades, even centuries, ago.
An outcry erupted last year in Ethiopia over an exhibit by the Victoria and Albert Museum on the 1868 British expedition to what was then called Abyssinia.
During that campaign, in which 13,000 troops were deployed to free several British hostages, the emperor killed himself and his fortress was captured and looted.
"Even at the time, this episode was regarded as a shameful one," the Victoria and Albert Museum said in its notes on the exhibit.
Ethiopians were appalled, with the government saying it would use "whatever legal and diplomatic instruments" to secure the return of related items including an intricate golden crown.
That locks of the emperor's hair were being held by another British museum was seen as particularly sensitive.
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"Displaying human parts in websites and museums is inhumane," Ethiopia's minister for culture and tourism, Hirut Woldemariam, told The Associated Press last year.
The National Army Museum has said the hair was donated in 1959 by relatives of an artist who painted the emperor on his deathbed.
"Our decision to repatriate is very much based on the desire to inter the hair within the tomb alongside the emperor" at a monastery in northern Ethiopia, Terri Dendy, the museum's head of collections standards and care, said in a statement.
It was not clear when the formal handover would occur. The Ethiopian Embassy in London said it would hold talks with the museum on Thursday about the repatriation, which comes at the end of a yearlong commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the confrontation known as the Battle of Maqdala.
The embassy in a statement commended the museum's decision as an "exemplary gesture of goodwill," adding that "a display of jubilant euphoria is to be expected when (the hair) is returned to its rightful home."