... Everyone who met Haile Selassie was struck by his eyes. The scholar Edward Ullendorff, translator of the first part of his lengthy but sternly unrevealing autobiography, describes the future emperor as having “delicate, slender, beautiful hands, imperious eyes”. Haile Selassie’s physician in the 1930s, a Frenchman, Dr Sassard, wrote “only his eyes seem alive—brilliant, elongated, extremely expressive eyes. They bespeak boredom as well as polite indifference, cold irony, or even anger.”
“The courtiers,” Sassard continued, “know these different expressions well and retire suddenly when the monarch’s glance becomes indifferent, then hard. On the other hand, especially when he is dealing with Europeans, his eyes know how to be soft, caressing, affable—even sincere.”
For four decades, from his accession to the throne in 1930, Ethiopia was increasingly defined by the figure of the emperor, a diminutive autocrat who wore an outsize sola topi, the canvas-covered hard hat once favoured by British empire-builders. A scion of the royal house of Shoa, one of the Highland provinces, Haile Selassie’s given name was Tafari Makonnen, his title
Ras. There being no rule of primogeniture in Ethiopia’s ruling dynasty, his accession to the imperial throne was by no means a foregone conclusion. But in the 1920s Ras Tafari ousted his rivals and manoeuvred his way to power through court intrigue, marginalizing the feudal lords of the highlands, consolidating the authority of the centre and becoming, under his new, regnal name, Haile Selassie, Power of the Trinity, the unchallenged ruler of the Ethiopian empire.
Ethiopia was the only country in Africa that had never been colonised by a European power; and Haile Selassie was the first Ethiopian ruler ever to travel abroad. In the words of Time magazine in 1935, in a back-handed citation for Man of the Year, “he rose out of murky obscurity and carried his country with him up and up into brilliant focus before a pop-eyed world”. He had, said Time, “a grasp of both savage and diplomatic mentality, and… plenty of what Hollywood calls
It”.
Haile Selassie’s motto as emperor was a phrase from the Book of Revelation, one that has been held to prophesy the coming of Christ: “The Lion of Judah Has Prevailed”. He was observed to be unusually fond of animals, lions in particular. According to a memoir by Hans Lockot, a German who acted as head of research at the National Library in Addis Ababa, the emperor found it easier to relax with lions than with human beings. In one of the royal palaces there was a menagerie where he kept a pride of tame lions—the black-maned Abyssinian variety—feeding them, it was said, each morning by hand. On churches and public buildings throughout the Empire representations of lions figured prominently, as they still do.
As ruler of Ethiopia Haile Selassie used the devices of tradition—an autocratic governing style, the mystical emblems of kingship—in a quest to modernize the country. He began the transformation of the ramshackle empire into a nation state, officially abolishing slavery, building schools and hospitals and establishing a centralized administration. In the face of opposition from Italy, the colonial power in Eritrea to the north, he argued for Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations, the precursor of the UN. It was at the League of Nations in Geneva, after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, that he delivered an eloquent speech of protest, the speech that put him on the cover of
Time. Another such speech later provided the lyric for Bob Marley’s reggae anthem, “War”.
Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, the dream of lasting peace will remain but a fleeting illusion.
(It was Marley who added the words of the refrain:
Everywhere is war.) ...
Burying the Emperorby John Ryle