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We are about to walk you through a wild, wild ride. We are going to take you from Steven Spielberg’s movie, “Raiders of the lost Ark,” starring Harrison Ford, to a quick exploration of the Ark of the Covenant, to the city of Axum, Ethiopia, where some say the Ark is now located, and then on to Rome. We will end up finally in Dar es Salaam, where we believe Tanzania’s President Mkapa, perhaps unwittingly, or perhaps very shrewdly, has hit upon what could turn out to be a major fire-storm on the matter of African intellectual property rights. Hold on tightly, this is going to be a fun-filled and fast ride through a complex labyrinth to a modern subject with profound implications. This story, originally published on this web site on June 24, 2001, has been in the news recently. The Ethiopian prime minister on June 10, 2002, formally asked Italy to return the Axum obelisk.

The New York Times, and others, reported last month that the Ethiopian prime minister had asked Italy to return the prized Axum Obelisk, a 1700-year-old monument taken from Ethiopia by the military forces of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini after they invaded the country in 1935. We did a story about this obelisk in June 2001, it was widely read, and thought we should resurrect it to complement the recent news about the Ethiopian request.

You remember the movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford and Karen Allen?

The movie was set in 1936, and was the first to introduce Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, an archaeologist and adventurer whose quests for rare antiquities frequently found him running from one menace to another.

The movie finds Dr. Jones in the middle of a Nazi plot to use the mysterious powers of the Ark of the Covenant to win World War II. Karen Allen plays the love interest with an old-fashioned “man’s woman” appeal (she can drink anybody under the table and is free with her fists). The constant, cliffhanger appeal of the movie remains great fun to this day — one is always wondering how Indy will get out of one scrape after another.

While fooling around, we came across this excerpt from the movie which led us down a trail that will finish where you never expected — the subject of African intellectual property rights.

Here’s the excerpt that got us going:

Eaton: What would the Nazis want with this–this Staff of Ra?

Brody: I can tell you that. Over the last two years the Nazis have had teams of archeologists running around the world looking for all kinds of religious artifacts

Musgrove: That’s right. Hitler’s a nut on the subject. Crazy. He’s obsessed with the occult.

Eaton: What is this Staff of Ra, anyway?

Indiana Jones: It all has to do with the Ark of the Covenant. The chest the Hebrews used to carry around the Ten Commandments. Now it’s the Army men who are impressed. An Egyptian pharaoh stole the Ark from Jerusalem and took it back to the city of Tanis. A short time later, Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a year. But before that, the Pharaoh had had the Ark hidden away in a secret chamber called the Well of the Souls. Which is where the Staff of Ra comes in.

With that, we began to look into the Ark of the Covenant.

Let’s first make sure we are all on the same page with regard to what the Ark of the Covenant is. We are not religious scholars, and the last thing we want to do is get into a religious argument, so we hope we don’t make too much of a mess of this. As we learned, great controversy still surrounds the Ark.

So we decided to stick with the Old Testament, Exodus 25:10-22, which said this:

“And they shall make an ark of acacia wood; two and a half cubits shall be its length, a cubit and a half its width, and a cubit and a half its height. And you shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and out you shall overlay it. And you shall make two cherubim of gold. And the cherubim shall stretch out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings. You shall put the mercy seat on top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the Testimony that I will give you. And there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of the Testimony, about everything which I will give you in commandment to the children of Israel.”

The Ark is thought to have disappeared in about 586 BC, and there is still a great deal of debate about where it might be. It is important, as it is thought to contain the original Ten Commandments.

During the course of our examination, we found ourselves getting more deeply involved in the religious aspects of this than we could absorb and adequately relate to you. We did learn, however, that some claim the Ark has been found and that it is in Ethiopia.

Since Ethiopia is in Africa, we proceeded down that path, and we came across a place named Axum. Axum, or Axume, is the titular metropolitan see of ancient Christian Ethiopia. Modern Axum is the capital of the Abyssinian province of Tigré, and nestles in a valley beneath the peak of the Adoua Mountains, at 7,545 feet above sea level. Beneath it is a vast plain in which arise several streams tributary to the Nile.

The city is of great antiquity, and was, together with Adule (Adoua on the coast), known to the Greeks and Romans as the chief center of trade, with the interior or Africa, for gold-dust, ivory, leather, hides, and aromatics.

Axum claims to hold in the innermost recesses of its cathedral the original Tables of the Law and the tabout, or Ark of the Covenant that the Abyssinians say was brought from Jerusalem to their ancient fortress of Ava by Menelek, the son of Solomon, and the Queen of Sheba, and transferred later to Axum.

So what this means is that there are those who say the Ark of the Covenant is located in this cathedral at Axum in Ethiopia. There is debate and controversy about that, we will lead you to articles on the subject, but that’s not where we’re headed.

We decided to explore the city of Axum, Ethiopia, and found a wonderful web site with great pictures, which we present to you below. We urge you to visit the site to study the larger views of the pictures and the accompanying text. We are leaving out the text because there is one picture from the group that caught our eye, and we’ll get to that in a moment. We want you to look at these pictures, now, however, to get a sense for the creativity and innovation that went into them. This creativity and innovation will, later in this report, become very important. So enjoy the pictures.

Armed guard and obelisk Axum, Ethiopia

The field of Obelisks, Axum, Ethiopia

Courtyard of St. Mary of Zion, Axum, Ethiopia

Church of St. Mary of Zion with Treasury of the
Arc of the Covenant in left background

The Treasury of the Arc of the Covenant Axum, Ethiopia

The hill containing the rock-cut church of
Bet Giorgis Lalibela, Ethiopia

Looking down on Bet Giorgis church, Lalibela

Ethiopian Orthodox priest with ancient Bible and crowns of Ethiopian kings, St. Mary of Zion, Axum

Bear with us just a few moments more. We are almost to the point we want to make.

Look at this picture.

Obelisco di Axum K58

This obelisk, the Italians call it Obelisco di Axum K58, was moved to Rome, which is where it is shown in this photo, from the city of Axum, Ethiopian in 1937 as a trophy of the colonial company of Italy in Eastern Africa. It dates from the 4th century and is 24 meters high.

Let’s again underline the key point: This obelisk was moved to Rome from Axum as a colonial trophy.

Now let’s switch gears just a bit.

While collecting our weekly business news stories, we noted a report from the Xinhua Chinese News Agency of June 15, 2001 that struck a chord. The report said Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa, shown here during an election, had urged the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to assist developing countries to create awareness in protecting property rights. The original story was apparently carried by the independent Guardian newspaper reported.

Mr. Mkapa pointed out that presently it was as if only the rich industrialized countries had intellectual property to safeguard and protect when for centuries those same powers accessed traditional African, Asian and Latin American knowledge without any compensation. It turns out, President Mkapa was focused while presenting these remarks on the fact that the rich countries have for a long time accessed medicinal plants in Africa and he was urging the WIPO to help create genetic banks to preserve some of the plants and local traditional food crops before being pushed out of the picture by genetically modified crops.

Well, let’s just mention one more point and then we’ll pull all this together. As you might know, there have been a flurry of arguments between the United States Trade Representative (USTR) and the Government of South Africa over intellectual property rights related to pharmaceuticals. This has all been tied up with HIV-AIDS medicines for South Africa, and now Kenya. These countries, and others, want to procure generic drugs abroad at much cheaper prices and the pharmaceutical giants of the US and Europe say they cannot do that because such an act will violate their intellectual property rights.

Well, as we worked to learn more about the Ark of the Covenant, we come across a picture on the internet of Obelisco di Axum K58, taken to Rome by the Italians in 1937 from Axum, Ethiopia, as a colonial trophy. And we say, President Mkapa, you have hit on a very, very significant point:

Where are the intellectual property rights belonging to Ethiopians with regard to Obelisco di Axum K58 taken from Axum as a colonial trophy?

Indeed, as you stroll through your local museum and look at the many African artifacts and other works of art that might be there, you might ask the same question. Where are the intellectual property rights of the Africans from whom these were taken?

Back in May 1997, the Software Publishers Association (SPA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the two leading trade associations of the software industry, released a study that said of the 523 million new business software applications used globally during 1996, 225 million units, nearly one in every two, were pirated. That represented a 20 percent increase in the number of units pirated over the 1995 estimate of 187 million units. Interestingly, revenue losses from software piracy were estimated at $511 million in 1996 for the Middle East and Africa.

In March 1998, we learned that Microsoft was offering a 15 percent discount to all organizations in Zimbabwe wanting to legalize their software as part of an anti-piracy campaign. In April 2000, South African computer dealers faced criminal and civil charges for piracy of Microsoft products. An undercover probe revealed that dealers were selling up to R600 million worth of pirated software. By March 2001, Microsoft had launched a major anti-piracy campaign in South Africa, saying it was a major problem causing the loss of 14,770 jobs. Microsoft said it was going to “clamp down hard on software piracy.”

You get our point? There are buildings and buildings filled with rules and laws, most of which were designed in the West, to govern intellectual property rights, as though only the West has such rights.

Africans have plenty of intellectual property to safeguard and protect. African laws need to be written and implemented to make sure that African intellectual property rights are not violated.

It was a long journey, but we finally got to a crucially important point. One of the great surprises that is going to strike the Western world in this post-Cold War era of the 21st century is that Western rule books aren’t going to be the only rulebooks in the world. Africans are going to have their rulebooks as well. The time has come to start dealing with Africans even handedly and respect, as President Mkapa put it, that Africans too have intellectual property to safeguard and protect, and much of that property is far more important than Microsoft Office or some Pfizer pill. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

There has been, throughout Africa’s very long history, which dates back to the arrival of man, a great deal of innovation and creativity that should receive intellectual property protection, that’s for sure.

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