In the summer of 1902, the foreigner who drew the largest crowds in London was not a European prince, nor a maharaja, nor an American senator. He was a soldier from the Ethiopian highlands — and wherever he walked, a priest walked beside him bearing a great silver cross.

The Postponed Crown

The coronation of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra had been fixed for 26 June 1902, and the princes and envoys of the world had crossed oceans to attend it. Then, three days before the ceremony, the King was taken gravely ill with an abdominal abscess that demanded immediate surgery. A telegram marked OFFICIAL went out across the Empire: the coronation was postponed, and pushed back to 9 August. For the foreign delegations who had already made the long and exhausting journey, sailing home and returning again was unthinkable. Most simply stayed, and waited out the interval in Europe. Among them was Ras Mäkonnen Wäldä-Mikael — governor of Harar, cousin and envoy of Emperor Menelik II, and one of the men whose armies had, six years earlier, broken a European power at Adwa.

The Envoy from Harar

To the London of 1902, Ras Mäkonnen was not merely another dignitary. Adwa was still fresh in the European imagination: in 1896 the Ethiopians had routed an invading Italian army and remained, alone on the continent, uncolonised. The man now moving through the receptions and studios of the capital had helped command that victory, and he carried himself as the representative of a sovereign state, not a supplicant. By the contemporary account, of all the princes and legations gathered from every quarter of the earth, none drew such admiration as the Ras.

He made a striking procession. Wherever he went, his father-confessor — Memhir Gäbrä Egzi’abeher, chief priest of the Harar district — accompanied him, bearing a tall silver processional cross that stopped Londoners in the street. The celebrated Lafayette studio at 179 New Bond Street photographed the delegation in its finery. The account has it, too, that the Lord Mayor of London received him at a luncheon, and that Mäkonnen presented the King and Queen with a zebra — a living token of the highlands — as a coronation gift. On 8 August, the day before the crown itself, Edward VII received him in audience and invested him as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George; the courts of France, Russia, Italy and the Ottoman Sultan would each, in turn, add their own stars to his breast.

“Of all the princes gathered from every quarter of the earth, none drew such admiration as the Ras.”

— as the London press recorded that summer

The American in the Crowd

It was in this same crowded London that Mäkonnen met one of the more improbable figures of the age. William Henry Ellis had been born into slavery in Victoria, Texas, in 1864 — a year before freedom reached him. By 1902 he had remade himself many times over: cattle-trader, cotton man, Wall Street broker, and a serial reinventor of his own identity who moved through the world as “Guillermo Enrique Eliseo,” passing as Cuban or Mexican as the moment demanded. He had dreamed of resettling Black Southerners abroad; and in Ethiopia — the one African nation to keep its sovereignty, and long a lodestar of Black American thought — he saw a country calling his name.

Mäkonnen invited him to come and see it. The following year, in 1903, Ellis made the journey: a three-week trek by camel from the coast to Addis Ababa, an audience with Menelik, and leave to grow cotton and build a mill. He would soon become entangled in the making of the first Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Ethiopia and the United States, and would claim — with characteristic boldness — that Menelik had named him Duke of Harar. The tangles of Ellis’s later Ethiopian adventures are a story for another day. What matters here is the meeting itself: in a London street, in the summer of a British coronation, the great symbol of African sovereignty and one of its most audacious American admirers found each other — an early, unlikely thread in the long weave of Ethiopia and the Black Atlantic.

Paris: Les Curiosités

With the crown still weeks away, the Ras used the interval as any traveller might: he went to see Paris. The photographs that survive from that detour are quietly extraordinary. In one, a crowd presses in around the Ethiopian party outside a shop whose awning reads, with unimprovable irony, Curiosités — the tricolour above. The men who had come to see the curiosities of Europe had themselves become the spectacle; Parisians craned and jostled for a look. In another, the delegation ascends the steps of a grand building in white shamma and dark capes, ushered up as the envoys of a recognised state — unhurried, unbowed, entirely at ease among the stone and glass of the Republic.

What the Pictures Keep

Set side by side, the three images tell a single story, and it is a story about standing. Here is a man from Harar in a Bond Street portrait studio; here is his priest’s silver cross catching the London light; here is his party on Parisian steps and in a Parisian crowd — and here, off-frame but present in the record, is a Texan born enslaved who would follow him home to the highlands. In the summer that Britain waited on its King’s recovery, Ethiopia sat, uncolonised and unhurried, among the crowns of the world — received, decorated, photographed, admired. Diplomacy, in the end, is partly a matter of being seen to belong. Ras Mäkonnen was seen. And more than a century on, the pictures still keep the proof.