Burying the Emperor

The emperor’s return

In 1936, driven out of Ethiopia by the invading Italian army, forced to leave his lions in Djibouti, Haile Selassie went into exile in England, in Bath, where he lived for the next four years. Then, in 1941, at the height of World War II, restored to the throne with the help of the British, he affirmed his role as a nationalist rallying-point and beacon of anti-fascism.

The father of an Ethiopian friend of mine, a feudal lord from one of the northern provinces, was summoned to the court by Haile Selassie, and then summarily banished to an ambassadorship abroad as part of the Emperor’s strategy of advancing control of the country. His son has a proclamation from the time of the Italian occupation pinned on his study wall, a reminder both of the Emperor’s authoritarian leadership, and of his ruthlessness. “Everyone will now be mobilized,” it states.

…and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Women with small babies need not go. Those blind, who cannot walk or for any reason cannot carry a spear are exempted.

“Anyone found at home after receipt of this order,” the Proclamation concludes, “will be hanged.”

In the romantic imagination of Europeans and Americans, Haile Selassie became a perfect combination of modern autocrat and noble savage—one who had the diplomatic savvy to be on the right side in the clash of the great powers. In Ethiopia, meanwhile, during the dark time of the war, through political will and force of personality, he became the embodiment of nationhood. During his reign, government control of the media ensured uncritical respect: the Emperor was lauded as the anointed representative of the ancient Solomonic dynasty, spearhead of progress and leader among leaders of the newly independent countries of Africa in the post-colonial era .

Only in the 1960s, in the fourth decade of his reign, did his domestic reputation falter. At this time student radicals began to criticize the pace of political reform; the educated elite that he had created became actively rebellious. Internationally, his reputation suffered from the attempt to conceal the effects of a famine in the province of Wollo. This fiasco was exposed by a BBC film that juxtaposed shots of a feast for foreign diplomats in the Emperor’s palace with images of starvation in the Ethiopian countryside.

Soon afterwards, in 1974, Haile Selassie was toppled by a military coup. Almost overnight in Ethiopia he became a non-person. Signs of his presence were systematically expunged from the capital; streets named after him were renamed; statues were removed and destroyed (or concealed, as some still are, under dustbins at the back of the national museum); his image on currency and postage stamps and in government offices was replaced with that of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the army colonel who was head of the Derg, the Marxist junta that deposed him. Only the lions remained.

From Garveyism to Rastafarianism

Even as he was erased from public spaces in Ethiopia, outside the country the name of Haile Selassie was gaining wider currency. Among the elites of Europe the Emperor’s reputation as a right-minded African leader had once made him a fashionable figure. In the political imagination of African-Americans he was accorded a greater and more enduring significance. During the ferment of spiritual and political debate in the United States and the Caribbean from the 1930s onwards Haile Selassie’s position as monarch of a country uncolonised by Europeans, combined with his claim to be descended in an ancient line from the Biblical Kings of Israel, gave his name unique mythic force.

Among those to recognize this was the Jamaican-born founder of the Back-to-Africa movement, Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association boasted, at its peak, a membership of hundreds of thousands. Garvey is widely credited as the first to make the connection between biblical prophecy and the new ruler of Ethiopia.

“Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King”, he told an audience in the 1920s. “He shall be the redeemer.”

In Garvey’s account of Haile Selassie’s coronation, he wrote, “It is for us of the Negro race to assist in every way to hold up the hand of Emperor Ras Tafari.”

Later Garvey changed his mind. Feeling slighted by the Emperor when he tried to visit him in England, and disillusioned by what he saw as his failure to embrace the cause of black people, Garvey came to the conclusion that Haile Selassie was not the messianic figure he had thought. He wrote bitter attacks on him, accusing him of espousing slavery and collaborating with white oppressors. But it was too late. Garvey had sown the seed of a new religion. Even as he lived out his life in England, Rastafarianism was taking shape in the ghettoes of Kingston, Jamaica, with Garvey as its prophet and Haile Selassie as its redeemer. As Bob Marley sang, “Almighty god is a living man.” When the Emperor made a state visit to Jamaica in 1966 he was astonished to be greeted at the airport by a huge crowd of dread-locked, ganja-smoking devotees who, he learned, considered him the embodiment both of Africanity and divinity.

In 1982, when I first visited Ethiopia, the only place you could see a picture of the Emperor, or any reference to him at all, was in the homes of Rastafarians in Shashemane, a Rift Valley town where Haile Selassie made land available to West Indians seeking a new life in the promised land. There in Shashemane I listened to an elderly Jamaican, Noel Dyer, describing his epic journey more than a decade before, away from what Rastafarians refer to as Babylon, the West—the corrupt domain of white people—overland through Europe and North Africa, then on foot up the Nile Valley, through Aswan and Khartoum, to the Ethiopian border.

Brother Dyer, as he was known to his fellow Rastas, still expressed his awe and gratitude at the Emperor’s fulfillment of his promise to give him a new home. But he and the others in the Jamaican community at Shashemane had barely established themselves before they saw their saviour deposed. For Brother Dyer and the other rastas of Shashemane Haile Selassie might be a living god, but in the 1980s in Ethiopia, under the Derg, this was not a belief it was wise to advertise.

During the decades that followed, as post-imperial Ethiopia became a byword for famine and war, the image of the Emperor in the outside world came to be defined by two egregious and contradictory texts. On the one hand there was Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor, an account by a Polish journalist of the rituals of palace life during the last days of his regime, a book in which the Emperor figures as a senile despot presiding over a court of sycophants. And on the other there was Bob Marley’s rasta hymnody, the devotional songs that gained reggae a global following, and that could be heard playing in the evenings in Shashemane. In the lyrics of these songs the Emperor figures, not as despot, but as a semi-divinity who is the source of all well-being.

Today in Ethiopia, under the government of Meles Zenawi, leader of the rebel army that overthrew the Derg, who is now the country’s Prime Minister, the name of the Emperor has returned discreetly to public discourse. You can buy a portrait of Haile Selassie in the kiosks that sell religious souvenirs, alongside pictures of the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel. And an Ethiopian royalist political party has been established (though it has not taken part in elections). There is even a local version of Jamaican reggae, with Amharic lyrics that invoke the Emperor’s name against a loping Trenchtown backbeat, with the massed horns of Ethiopian pop calling out in the foreground.

But the leading spirits of the present government of Ethiopia, some of whom began their insurgency back during the Emperor’s time, are very far from being monarchists. And politics in Ethiopia remains bitter and unforgiving. There is still no agreement about Haile Selassie, about the meaning of his life, or about the circumstances of his death. And the Emperor’s funeral, far from being the occasion, as some had hoped, for an act of national reconciliation, was turning out to be the source of further dissent.

“A thief thinks everyone else is a thief”

The weeks leading up to the funeral had been filled with uncertainty and alarm. While the Emperor’s lineal descendants, most of whom live in Europe or North America, were gathering in Addis Ababa, the government issued a statement dissociating itself from the ceremony in unequivocal terms.

“Haile Selassie’s reign,” the statement ran, “was marked by its brutality and extreme oppression of the Ethiopian peasants.” The Emperor, it said, was a tyrant who caused untold misery while amassing a huge personal fortune looted from the people of Ethiopia. This had been deposited in foreign banks; the government was still trying to get it back.

Outside government circles, though, there was scepticism about these official expressions of indignation. An anti-government newspaper, Menilek (named after Haile Selassie’s predecessor as emperor), reported the story under a mocking headline: a thief thinks everyone else is a thief.

Two of the Emperor’s grandchildren, Prince Ermias Sahle-Selassie and Prince Bekere Fikre-Selassie, members of the Imperial Crown Council, a Washington-based royalist group, who were visiting their homeland for the first time in twenty-six years, left the country immediately after the government announcement. They were at the airport as I arrived, on their way back to Rome. Prince Ermias, a smooth, cosmopolitan figure in his forties, announced that the government was deliberately neglecting security arrangements for the funeral in order to increase the risk of violence and discourage attendance.

The royal family itself was divided, however. Other members distanced themselves from the political agenda of the Imperial Crown Council; they were determined that the funeral should go ahead. These included Prince Zara Yacob, the Oxford-educated son of the late Crown Prince, a troubled soul who spent some time in the 1980s living with Rastafarians in Manchester, and Prince Beede Mariam Mekonen, who was due to deliver the funeral oration, as well as their aunt, the octogenarian Princess Tenagne-Worq, the only surviving child of the Emperor.

According to one of Ryszard Kapuściński’s informants, in his absorbing but factually questionable book, The Emperor, Princess Tenagne-Worq had been closest to the Emperor in the last days of his regime, urging him to more ruthless suppression of the growing rebellion against his rule. Now, though, of all the members of the royal family, it was said, it was she who was most insistent that the funeral should go ahead, with or without the government imprimatur.

As we arrived in Meskal Square the day of the funeral, it seemed that Prince Ermias might have been right about the government’s desire to discourage attendance. The crowd was certainly on the small side. There was a smattering of the diplomatic corps, including the ambassadors of South Korea and Togo and the acting British head of mission; but, significantly, no sign of the ambassador of the United States, a country that has been one of the current Ethiopian government’s principal supporters, as it had once been of Haile Selassie’s regime. The funeral programme, hastily printed a few days before, announced that there would be an official representative of the Ethiopian government present, but there was none to be seen.

Earlier on in the day I had been drinking coffee with an Ethiopian friend at Leyu Muya, a café with a panoramic view across Meskal Square. As we were talking, Ato Kinfe, the Head of National Security, walked in. A startlingly youthful figure, one of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s right-hand men since the time they served together in the rebel Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front, he took a discreet look around and departed. Only my companion noticed him. The drop-in by Ato Kinfe turned out to be the closest to an official government presence there was at the funeral.

Scars of the Red Terror

Meskal Square, like the rest of Addis Ababa, is haunted by the violence of the Derg. A wide, windswept space, designed for rallies and march-pasts, it was the location of Mengistu’s most notorious speech. In the 1970s, around the time of the Emperor’s death, as rival leftist groups waged guerilla warfare against each other, Mengistu announced a campaign of urban counter-insurgency which he called, with conscious reference to the French and Russian revolutions, the Red Terror. The Red Terror claimed the lives of thousands of young Ethiopians who were accused by members of neighbourhood committees of being “counter-revolutionaries”.

Announcing the campaign in Meskal Square, Mengistu had smashed vials of blood-red liquid on the ground to represent the death of “imperialists and renegades”. The place, he announced, would henceforth be known as Abiot Square–Revolution Square. Huge North Korean-designed hoardings with portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin, were erected to greet visitors to the country as they drove in from the airport. Further up the hill was a similarly vast and flattering portrait of Mengistu himself. In Addis Ababa, it became clear, one emperor had been substituted by another, Louis XIV had been replaced with Stalin.

It is hard to fathom the brutalizing effect of the Red Terror campaign. It was a time when citizens of Ethiopia might wake in the morning to find the mutilated body of a brother or a husband or a son lying in the street with a sign pinned on the body saying i was an anarchist or i betrayed the revolution. To reclaim the corpse the family of a victim was sometimes, notoriously, required to pay the cost of the bullet. Those who managed to get the bodies of their relatives back were the fortunate ones. Many of the remains were not recovered till after the fall of the Derg, in the spate of disinterments that included the Emperor’s.

In a country where rituals of grief are of paramount importance (the Ethiopian church prescribes forty days of prayer for the dead) the Derg announced that mourning was banned. A relative of one of the victims of the Red Terror described to me how the mothers of the dead had secretly organised a keening committee. Its name—the u-u-ta committee—echoed the ululation of grief-stricken women. One of them would start and another would carry on, until the sound of crying was heard in every home. It seems as though an echo of this crying can still be heard in Meskal Square.

Marcus Garvey (left); Mengistu Haile Mariam (right)

Today the Square is empty, stripped of Communist icons. Its original name has been restored. A tiny stone plinth commemorates the thousands who lost their lives in the Red Terror. The memorial is scarcely the size of a tombstone. There is no monument to the Emperor at all. Or to any ruler. The present Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, has turned his back on the cult of personality as practiced by Mengistu and by Haile Selassie. In fact it is hard to find a picture of Meles anywhere in the city. (His very name is not his own, but a nom de guerre, adopted from that of a fallen comrade.)

This does not make the new regime democratic, but it would be true to say there are more freedoms in Ethiopia today under Meles’ rule than there were under the Derg—more, some would say, than there were under the Emperor. Still, the style of politics in Ethiopia has not changed. The ruling party does not engage with its critics. There is no national dialogue. And the government is unpopular in the capital. Its leading figures hail from elsewhere in the country, from Tigray to the north. The Amhara elite, mostly native to Addis Ababa and accustomed to wielding authority, feels disenfranchised. There is a void in the life of the city, as though power itself had fled.

Meles Zenawi himself described this phenomenon in an interview I conducted with him some years ago. “Politics in this country was essentially armed politics,” he said. “You didn’t win through arguments, through logic, you won through shooting straighter than the other guy. So victories and defeats were to a large extent total.”

“And even if they were not total,” the Prime Minister concluded, “they were perceived to be total. That does not encourage compromise.”

And there is the legacy of the war with Eritrea, a war that is barely over. A two-year armed conflict with the former northern province of Ethiopia, an independent country since 1993, ended in an uneasy peace last year, leaving tens of thousands of casualties and extensive displacement from the border areas. The war produced a brief, unifying surge of nationalism in Ethiopia, but it has sapped the economy of the country. Famine threatens again in the highlands; and the streets of Addis Ababa are filled with ever-increasing numbers of desperate, homeless people: street children, war veterans and indigent peasants from the countryside.

All this makes Addis, despite its astonishingly beautiful setting in a bowl of hills, a strangely dispiriting place. It is barely a hundred years old, yet it has the air of a mediaeval city, where reeking tin-shack slums huddle below palaces and grand municipal buildings on the banks of effluent-filled streams. A recent study reported that almost half the inhabitants of the capital lack proper housing. Beggars grab your sleeve wherever you go, or tap on the window of your taxi.

“Hungry!” they cry. “Stomach Zero! Father! Give me bread!”.

The city lies at a high altitude, over 7,000 feet above sea level; after dark in winter it can be very cold. A walk in the streets at midnight reveals scenes of profound misery, people seeking shelter in hedges and ditches, with no blankets or firewood, fighting with feral dogs for sleeping space.

The only recent event to cause unequivocal celebration has been the victory in the Olympics of the long-distance runner Haile Gabre-Selassie, whose face is now the most recognizable in the country. His return from Sydney with the 10,000-metre gold medal had been, by all accounts, a much bigger event than the funeral of the Emperor. On the day of the funeral, I came across him among the mourners in Meskal Square, a genial man, as self-effacing as it’s possible to be when you are a national hero and your portrait soars seven storeys up the side of an office building in sight of the Square.

My Ethiopian friend, Tafari, not altogether unsympathetic to the government, saw the funeral as a missed opportunity. As we crossed the square he reflected that the Prime Minister, having permitted the event to go ahead, could have claimed the credit for arranging it. But instead he had allowed the government spokesman to pour cold water on the whole thing by repeating the old canard about the Emperor’s ill-gotten gains and the Swiss gold. And by boycotting the funeral the government had missed another chance for good publicity internationally. This, said Tefari, was not the sort of mistake the Emperor himself would have made.

But the government may have been studying the demographics. It is over twenty-five years since the Emperor died. Most Ethiopians are under that age. For them the name of Haile Selassie means little. It means less, probably, than that of the other Haile, the Olympic athlete. These young adults in Ethiopia today grew up in a time when the Emperor was written out of the history books, as he still is, more or less. In a secondary school textbook of Ethiopian history that I picked up at random in the Mega bookshop off Meskal Square (part of a retail chain associated with the ruling party) the forty-odd years of Haile Selassie’s reign, the years that ushered Ethiopia into the modern era, are dealt with in just four paragraphs.

An acquaintance of mine, who had himself lived through the Red Terror, expressed despair over this loss of communal memory. During the funeral procession, he told me, one of the street children who habitually harass passers-by had accosted him. The child, no more than twelve, said this:

“So, you bald old man, why are you bothering with this Haile Selassie? Has he not been dead for a long time?”

How did he respond to these taunts? I asked him. He could not feel anger, he said, at the ignorance of these abandoned children, only sorrow.

What he said to them was this: “I pray that you do not live to see such days as I have seen.”

At Holy Trinity cathedral

In Meskal Square the Emperor’s cortège was part way through its trajectory round the city. Now it left at high speed. The organizers were nervous about the government’s reluctance to provide them with a full security escort. The procession passed the football stadium and headed up Churchill Avenue, the broad, steep main street of the city, past the National Theatre and the Black Lion hospital and the Post Office–all buildings that had been constructed in the Emperor’s time—past the coffin-shops and the government buildings. It halted at the top of the hill, for a mass at St George’s Church.

The Emperor had been crowned here seventy years before, in a ceremony whose pageantry marked the dawn of his international celebrity. The coronation was covered at length for The Times of London by Evelyn Waugh, who later lampooned the event in his novel, Black Mischief. In the United States National Geographic magazine—mindful, no doubt of what Time magazine had called the Emperor’s “It”—gave the coronation sixty pages, its longest-ever story.

At the Emperor’s funeral, faint echoes of the coronation spirit could be seen in the gaudy uniforms of the war veterans as they stood to attention alongside the hearse. But this momentary splendour passed. The cortège turned eastwards, skirting the lion park—where a dozen mangy specimens, said to be descendants of the original imperial pets, could still be seen—and headed back down towards the Cathedral, where the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Church was preparing to perform the final ceremony. Here the cars slowed down to negotiate the narrow approach to the Cathedral, sandwiched between two modern buildings, the Parliament and the Politburo. It drew to a halt in the forecourt, where the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Church, Abuna Paulos, sat enthroned on the steps with the mourners assembled around him.

Priests and deacons with bright velvet parasols crowded the forecourt. Keening women strained at the barriers round the church, photographers and television cameramen scrambled up the stone statues of the evangelists outside the building in search of a better camera angles; foreign reporters rushed around in search of translators from Amharic and Ge’ez (the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Church—a language that is to everyday Amharic as Latin is to Italian). Some of the journalists held scribbled genealogical diagrams in their hands, trying to relate them to the royal mourners, wondering which prince or princess they had just been interviewing.

The royal family, dressed in black, were sitting in a line: Princess Tegagne-Worq, the Emperor’s daughter, seventeen years a prisoner of the Derg, with her nephews and nieces and great nephews and great nieces alongside her. They formed a living diagram, if you could decipher it, of the Solomonic dynasty, the lineage of which Haile Selassie claimed to be the two hundred and twenty-fifth representative. The perfectly-dressed princes in their silk ties and handkerchiefs, their Savile Row suits and dove-grey Homburgs, brought a suggestion of the ancien regime to the proceedings, a glimpse of the vanished life of the imperial court. Several of the young princesses were strikingly beautiful.

It was hard, though, not to see this as the last gasp of the old dynasty. The Emperor’s features did not seem to be reflected in their faces. (Court gossip at the time ascribed this to a complex pattern of extra-marital affairs and dubious paternity.) Most of the younger members of the royal family have lived outside Ethiopia all their lives. An inordinate number work in public relations, a skill they may have inherited from their grandfather. They have come to resemble the disinherited royal families of Europe, with little to distinguish them from the rest of the free-floating global haute bourgeosie apart from their orotund ranks and titles.

The patriarch spoke. He discussed the role of the Emperor in the church, in the history of the country, and the cruel manner of his death. There were murmurs of approbation. Abuna Paulos is from Tigray and had been assumed to be a supporter of the government; so his unambiguous praise for the Emperor, contrasting with government statements, came as a pleasant surprise to the royals and their supporters.

Soon the priests began to dance, a feature of the Ethiopian ritual that reenacts the dance of King David before the ark of the covenant, a reminder of the Solomonic pedigree of the Emperors of Ethiopia. As the ritual unfolded, the photographers clambered higher up the statues of the evangelists; the journalists consulted their translators assiduously. Finally, the giant coffin was carried inside the cathedral, up the aisle to a screened area where the sculpted tomb was open to receive it. Princess Tenagne-Worq took the flag that covered it and the pall-bearers prepared to lower it into the tomb.

But there was a last-minute hitch. The coffin would not fit. It was too big. Stone-masons had to be called to chip away the inside to make space for it. It was some hours before the interment finally took place. Even in death, it seemed, the Emperor, diminutive though he was, turned out to be a greater figure than the tomb could hold.

Dissenting rastafarians

For one group of mourners none of this mattered. This was because they did not believe the Emperor was in his coffin at all. For his rastafarian followers Haile Selassie is, in some sense, still living. This, however, did not stop a number of them attending the funeral. Most prominent among these attendees was Rita Marley, Bob Marley’s widow. She cut an impressive figure, a grande veuve clad in an extravagantly gold-embroidered Ethiopian dress, her locks piled high on her head, entwined in a mauve velvet ribbon. Shortly before the service began I saw her behind the cathedral clutching a wreath taken from the hearse. I asked her whether she thought the Emperor was actually dead. She began to sing, sotto voce. “Like Bob say,” she murmured, “It not an end, it a new beginning.”

Later, inside the Cathedral, I saw Rita Marley again. She had removed her shoes in the appointed manner before stepping over the threshold. Then, when the service was over, she approached the Patriarch to be blessed. Though her attire was hardly self-effacing, it was eclipsed by his: his gold floor-length robe, his white satin slippers, his many rings, his head-dress decorated with enamel vignettes of saints, surmounted by a jewelled crucifix. As Mrs Marley approached the Patriarch she stooped and kissed his signet ring, a revealing gesture of obeisance towards the Ethiopian church from one of its wayward new world offspring.

After the ceremony I talked to a leading British-born Rastafarian, Ambrose King, who lives in Addis Ababa. Mr King works as a building engineer and acts as international liaison officer of the Ethiopian World Federation, which was founded in New York in the 1930s with the aim of promoting the repatriation of Africans in the diaspora to Ethiopia. It was one of the organizations that sponsored settlement in Shashemane, in the Rastafarian community in the Rift Valley, south of Addis Ababa, which was established in the 1960s by the Emperor’s fiat. Much of Mr King’s present work involved raising funds for its development. He had not been in attendance at the funeral. He was skeptical, he said, about the identity of the body we had seen buried the week before.

“This is the third time they try to bury these bones, you know,” he told me over breakfast.

“The first time, in 1992, them say they was a thousand Rasta coming to the funeral, but Rasta stay away from it, then and now.”

“If they is a body lost for seventeen years and you find this body ‘tis a natural thing to do tests and t’ings. But they don’t. No one saw him die. No one saw him buried. And no one do any DNA test.”

“So,” Mr King concluded as we tucked into our breakfast, “we do not believe it is him.”

In the Menilek Palace

One day in Addis Ababa I walked back towards the Menilek Palace, where the Emperor spent his last days. Though he was now, pace Ambrose King, in his final resting place, in legal terms his death still remained an unsolved crime. For seven years, off and on, in a courtroom on the other side of Addis Ababa, the members of the Derg, who have been imprisoned since their fall from power in 1991, have been on trial. They are charged with a range of offences that include, among many others, the killing of the Emperor. In the courtroom, from time time, fragments of evidence are presented that add to the picture of his last days. From recent testimonies in the trial, now in its eighth year, it is finally possible to construct a more detailed account of the event.

The Menilek Palace, named after Haile Selassie’s predecessor, founder of the city of Addis Ababa, is a rambling collection of Ottoman-style wooden and Italianate stone buildings on a hill in the heart of the city. The word “palace” is misleading: the random distribution of the buildings reveals its origin as a military encampment, a role it reverted to under the Derg, where it served as a prison and torture centre.

Despite its commanding position above the city it is a gloomy place, overshadowed by pines and cypresses and the ubiquitous blue-gum trees of Addis (eucalypts that were introduced during Menilek’s reign in order to provide a perennial source of firewood, an innovation that enabled Menilek to make the city his permanent capital). On the summit of the hill is a colonnaded building known, owing to its unusual shape, as the Egg House. From here Menilek used to survey the city with a telescope. This is where Haile Selassie spent much of his working life, and where he spent his last days.

The Palace is still one of the centres of power in Ethiopia, normally inaccessible to those not on high government business. In 1995 I was able to visit it in the company of one of Haile Selassie’s former court officials, a man who had been imprisoned there for six years under the Derg. He showed me the site on the north side where the Emperor had been buried and the Ottoman-style pavilion where he had passed his final days. And he showed me the meeting room of the Derg (a word which means “Committee”), the room where the Emperor’s fate had, allegedly, been decided.

So who did kill Haile Selassie? What exactly happened on the night of August 25, 1975? Even twenty-five years afterwards, in international press reports on the funeral, the most popular adjective was still the journalistic stand-by, “mysterious”. Although it is widely accepted that the Emperor was murdered, the event has been surrounded for years by rumour and invention. The official announcement of the death of the ex-emperor (the term used by the Derg) appeared in a single paragraph in the government newspaper at the end of August 1975. It ascribed his death to “circulatory failure”. In Addis Ababa, a city where no one believes government announcements, and where rumour travels faster than light, it was assumed immediately that he had been done away with.

In the years that followed the stories multiplied. It was said that the killers and the witnesses had all themselves been killed. And that those who killed them had been killed in their turn. Or, alternatively, that the man who murdered the Emperor—by strangling and kicking him—was still alive and living clandestinely in Kenya. It was said—without evidence—by some that Haile Selassie had been killed by Mengistu Haile Mariam himself, with his bare hands, after others had wavered.

Who killed the Emperor?

The first of these stories, it now seems, was false. For a start, there was clearly someone who knew where the body was buried. When officials of the new regime took over the Menilek Palace in 1991 they were told where they could find the Emperor’s remains, as they were told where to find the remains of other victims of the Derg. These exhumations formed part of the evidence at the Derg trial when it began in 1995.

I was in Addis Ababa at that time to cover the opening of the trial. During the first weeks of the proceedings I found myself sitting next to a lawyer named Teshome Gabre-Mariam. He had been Attorney-General in the imperial administration and was one of the witnesses to the exhumation of Haile Selassie’s body. In the account I wrote of the trial of the Derg I described Teshome’s reaction to the reading of the charges. It was the first time since the announcement of the Emperor’s death twenty years before that his name had been uttered in official discourse:

“His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, King of Kings, The Lion of Judah Shall Conquer….” the judge began, using the Emperor’s full title and his official motto, “was murdered in a cruel and disgraceful manner, suffocated in his bedchamber.”

There was a momentary hush in the courtroom at that point. In the recess Teshome stared at the Derg members as they filed back into the courtroom. “Ah,” he said. “Murder the emperor! A man of eighty-three! What was the point? These people have no honour.”

Teshome, I learned then, had been a prisoner in the Menilek Palace when the Emperor was killed. He had narrowly escaped death himself. In 1974, he told me, he had been arrested with other government officials and incarcerated in the cellar beneath the Derg’s meeting room, near the iron-roofed pavilion where the Emperor was held incommunicado. On November 23, 1974, in the evening, guards came to the cellar at the Palace and called out the names of forty-seven of the ministers–rases, dejazmatches, fitwraris, the feudal dignitaries of the court–along with the highest-ranking admirals and generals and their bodyguards, a group that a US diplomat at the time described as “our guest list for the Fourth of July celebration”.

Teshome described to me how he and the other prisoners watched through the skylight of their cellar as their colleagues were driven away from the palace. Later they learned how the officials, with a dozen others who had been held elsewhere—fifty-nine in all—were taken to the central prison, the same prison where the Derg members are held today. They were lined up against a floodlit wall, the outer wall of an electrocution chamber that had recently been installed by order of the Emperor, intended for the execution of those convicted of capital crimes. There, soldiers raked the government officials with machine gun fire. They were buried the next day in a trench. Today their remains are in a locked mausoleum in the graveyard of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, a hundred yards from the Emperor’s tomb.

The nature of the imperial administration meant that the Emperor was related by marriage or birth to at least half of the fifty-nine victims. And their fate was a foretaste of his. Weeks later he, too, was arrested. He was driven from his office at the Jubilee Palace in an anonymous Volkswagen Beetle, so that he would not be recognised as he passed through the streets. He was accompanied, it was reported, only by his poodle, Lulu. Thus the King of Kings and his lapdog, rode, for the first and last time, in the people’s car.

Eight months later, on August 25, 1975, soldiers of the Derg came to the Emperor’s quarters in the Jubilee Palace and ordered his servants to leave. It was the last the servants saw of him. In court two decades afterwards, one of them, now an old man himself, described how the eighty-three year old monarch wept and prayed to God when he realized he was about to be killed. The court translator used an archaic form of words in his English version, corresponding perhaps, accidentally or otherwise, to the antique Amharic diction of the witness. According to him the servant heard his master say, “Is it not true, Ethiopians, that I have strived for you?” Then, he told the court, “The emperor sprinkled the floor with his tears. He knelt down and wept and started praying. He understood that it was the end of his days.”

A second palace servant, a man named Eshetu, said he was ordered by guards to leave the room adjoining the Emperor’s, where he normally slept. “The next morning,” he said, “I knocked on his bedroom door and opened it. There was an unusual odour and his face was black.” The emperor’s bedclothes, he added, were not his usual ones; and a bandage was around his neck.

Finally a third witness, a maintenance worker at the palace, described how security officials ordered him to dig a number of graves in the grounds that morning. He was told to dig four graves; this was so that it would not be known which of them contained the Emperor’s body. Others said that Mengistu came to the palace and inspected the corpse before it was interred.

No autopsy was performed. The Emperor’s physician, Asrat Woldeyes, was not called to the palace in time to observe the death. He told the court “The day his death was announced, I received a phone call from the Derg office asking me to go to the office of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. I saw that Colonel Mengistu seemed angry… then we were informed that there would be no interview and we could leave.”

Professor Asrat, a leading figure in the opposition to the current government of Ethiopia (who himself died in May 1999, soon after he gave this account to the court), said he did not think the deposed emperor had died naturally. He testified: “Despite an operation on the prostate a few months before his death, his Majesty was in excellent health.”

According to those who spoke to him outside the court, Ato Eshetu, the Emperor’s servant, believed that the emperor had been asphyxiated, suffocated with an ether-soaked pillow. He was reported to have said, elaborating his statement to the court, that in death the Emperor’s face “looked like granite. There were blue spots on his skin.”

No one has been named as Haile Selassie’s murderer, and the prosecution has not produced any evidence to show that there was a formal decision taken to end his life. A Norwegian journalist, Einar Lunde, citing a former Derg member, Major Negash Tesfatsion, has stated that the Emperor’s fate was decided by a formal vote of the Derg. But this is denied by another of the defendants in the Derg trial, Fikre-Selassie Weg-Deres, the former Prime Minister, who was Mengistu’s second-in-command. When I interviewed Fikre-Selassie Weg-Deres in prison in 1995, soon after the start of his trial, he maintained that there was no evidence that the Emperor was killed at all.

“It was not the subject of a meeting,” he told me. “We don’t believe that he was killed. We believe he died a natural death. He was an old man. There was no danger from him.”

Fikre-Selassie’s statement, of course, serves his interests as a defendant. It may be noteworthy, however, because, while denying complicity in the Emperor’s death, he does acknowledge the Derg’s responsibility for other deaths at the time, including the decision to execute the fifty-nine ministers.

Only one man knows the whole truth: Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the Derg throughout its bloodstained history. And he is not likely to break his silence. After his fall from power Mengistu was given sanctuary by President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. He has lived ever since in a guarded villa in the suburb of Gun Hill in Harare, where he has survived at least one assassination attempt. The condition of his domicile in Zimbabwe is that he does not speak to the press, though he has broken this injunction on a number of occasions. On the day of the funeral, using a borrowed mobile phone in Meskal Square, I tried calling Mengistu to ask how he felt about the ceremony, but I got no answer from the house in Gun Hill.

The trial of the Derg continues today in Addis Ababa. It has been riven with delays and procedural irregularities. At one point the Special Prosecutor was himself arrested and jailed for contempt of court. It seems unlikely that the prosecution has any more significant evidence to present. When the Emperor’s body was exhumed the royal family reportedly refused to submit it to forensic examination. This may have been because of a superstition that if the body of the monarch were to be tampered with other members of the family would die; or it may have been due to fears that tests could expose irregularities in the tangled bloodline of the Solomonic dynasty, where there are many cases of disputed paternity.

Now that the Emperor has been buried it is fairly certain that there will never be an autopsy, nor a DNA test. In this sense Ambrose King and the Rastafarians are right: there is no certain proof that the body is the Emperor’s. Unless the perpetrator himself comes forward, or unless Mengistu Haile Mariam, in his refuge in Zimbabwe, has a sudden attack of conscience, it seems that this account of the Emperor’s death is all that posterity is likely to have. Not enough to convince a die-hard Rastafarian, but enough for most other people to conclude that Haile Selassie’s end certainly did not come by natural means.

Venerable skeletons

Before leaving Ethiopia I visited the national museum in Addis Ababa to see another celebrated skeleton, that of the early hominin, Lucy. Lucy—or Denkinesh as she is known to Ethiopians—lived three million years ago in the Awash Valley in lowland Ethiopia. Her remains were discovered by a team of American and Ethiopian paleoanthropologists in 1974, shortly before the Emperor was killed and buried in Addis Ababa. Her skeleton is the most complete record of early hominin anatomy known.

A cast of Lucy’s bones lies in the basement of the museum, not far from the Cathedral where Haile Selassie lies entombed. The descent to the basement of the museum put me in mind of my earlier visit to the crypt of Bata Mariam church to see the Emperor’s coffin before its transition to its final resting place. In the basement of the museum Lucy’s bones are laid out in a glass case, a splay of carefully arranged and labelled ribs, vertebrae, and skull fragments. In this respect her fate is the antithesis of the Emperor’s. While his remains are now inviolate, sealed from the public gaze, Lucy’s have been studiously exposed and tested to extract every possible ounce of meaning.

During the year 2000, though, new evidence was revealed suggesting that Lucy is probably not our oldest ancestor after all. Remains of more ancient hominins have been found in Chad, and in Ethiopia itself. The story of human evolution, like that of the Solomonic dynasty, is not settled yet. As with the Emperor, interpretations put on Lucy’s life are liable to change—and continue to change—as time passes.

Haile Selassie’s burial may mark the end of the monarchical idea as a force in Ethiopian history, even as autocratic forms of government continue there. Across the world the age of kings is finally coming to an end. Outside North Africa and the Middle East only half a dozen countries still have hereditary rulers. And among them only the rulers of Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan and Japan still have any whiff of mystical authority about them. Monarchs have become an endangered species.

In Ethiopia, the burial of Haile Selassie concludes a phase in the country’s political history, but this does not mean that his life will cease to be subject to scrutiny and reinterpretation. Rather, it marks a release of his memory into the competing realms of historiography and mythology. Harold Marcus, an American academic who has been working on a biography of Haile Selassie for the last two decades, is due to complete his work this coming year. There are a growing number of websites devoted to the idea of the Emperor’s divinity and to the merits of obscure claimants to his throne.

Whether it is the forensic gaze of the legal process that continues at an ever-slowing pace in Addis Ababa, or the mythopoetic magnifying lens of the Rastafarians, or the patient documentary attentions of biographers and historians, the memory of the Emperor, the small man who was too big for his tomb, is unlikely to lie undisturbed for long. ✭

Afterword

Five months after Haile Selassie’s funeral a new political crisis began to unfold in Ethiopia. Internal divisions in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the majority party in the ruling coalition, led to a purge of government ministers. A strike by students at the university was violently suppressed. And on May 12, a key figure in the TPLF, the youthful head of security, Kinfe Gebremedhin—the man we glimpsed in the Leya Muya café in Meskal Square on the morning of the funeral—was assassinated as he entered the armed forces officers’ club.

The assailant was identified as Tsehaye Woldeselassie, a major in the Ethiopian army and fellow-member of the TPLF. The killing was said to be a crime of passion rather than a political assassination, but there were doubters. In August 2007, Major Woldesellasie was executed. Further splits and purges in the government followed; the President resigned, then withdrew his resignation. Some of the officials of the Derg era, detained since 1991, were released, then rearrested. The effect of these tremors in the body politic, as is often the case in Ethiopia, was not clear.

In April 2003, Haile Selassie’s only daughter, Princess Tegagne-Worq, died in Addis Ababa at the age of 90. The Emperor’s biographer, the American scholar Harold Marcus, died the same year, with the second volume of his biography still unfinished. Edward Ullendorf, translator of Haile Selassie’s own autobiography, died in 2011. And in August 2012 Meles Zenawi, who had been successively president and prime minister of Ethiopia, himself died. He was succeeded by his deputy, Hailemariam Dessalegn.

Among other accounts of the Emperor’s funeral, there was a noteworthy article in The National Post of Canada, which appeared on March 3, 2001. The author, Aida Eidemariam, interviewed Prince Beede Mariam Mekonen, the grandson of Haile Selassie, who had delivered the main oration at the Emperor’s funeral service in Holy Trinity Cathedral. The article noted that another member of the royal family, also living in Canada, had recently taken the role of Simba, the lion, in a Toronto production of The Lion King.

A correction to the article is due: the original version stated that in Haile Selassie’s last drive, in a Volkswagen Beetle, from the Jubilee Palace to the Menilek Palace, he was accompanied by his poodle, Lulu. Though this has been reported in other places, it seems that the information is incorrect. Lulu died some years before and was buried in the Japanese garden at the Jubilee Palace. If the Emperor was accompanied by a pet dog on his last drive, as he seems to have been, it must have been a different one. (My thanks to Tafari Wossen for this information, incorporated in the revised version of the article here.)

In a subsequent article in the Times Literary Supplement the present author reviewed some of the misrepresentations of Haile Selassie and his court in Ryszard Kapuściński’s book, The Emperor (See “At Play in the Bush of Ghosts”, published in the TLS, July 27, 2001, as “Tales of Mythical Africa”).

In 2019 a statue of Haile Selassie was unveiled at the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa.