King of Kings: The Triumph and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia by Asfa-Wossen Asserate,  translated from German by Peter Lewis, London,  Haus Publishing, 2015

In his exhaustive, deeply affecting biography of the life of his great-uncle Emperor Haile Selassie, Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate talks about his relationship with the emperor by invoking a particular incident. Asserate, 72, who spent his childhood and adolescence in Addis Ababa, was a student in Germany when harrowing images of the famine came from the provinces of Wollo in the autumn of 1973. “In Frankfurt, where I was studying at the time, I myself had organized a benefit concert for the ‘flying doctors’ who were working in Ethiopia and raised a decent sum,” he writes.

The occasion coincided with the final visit of Emperor Haile Selassie to Germany, on 12 September 1973, exactly a year to the day before he was deposed by army officers and driven from his palace into detention. “A large crowd had gathered on the Castle Square in Stuttgart, where the emperor was due to meet Hans Filbinger, the state president of Baden-Wurttemberg; most of them were there to cheer Haile Selassie and wave Ethiopian flags, but a handful of protesting students from the nearby University of Hohenheim had also mingled with the crowd. They were holding up placards with slogans proclaiming ‘Haile Selassie-Go Home and Feed your starving People !’ and ‘Death to Imperialism !’ and handing out leaflets to passers-by. The emperor and his entourage had been put up at the Monrepos Lake Palace in Ludwigsburg, just north of Stuttgart, and I was summoned to his suit there for an audience with Haile Selassie.

 ….the emperor asked me: ‘By the way, who told you the Ethiopians were starving?’ I knew he didn’t approve of my fundraising initiative, but I was determined to fight my corner. ‘Your Majesty,’ I replied cautiously, ‘I don’t believe that I am doing anything wrong. The flying doctors perform an important role, they’ve already proved that in Kenya. I’m sure their aid will be good for our country as well.’ Haile Selassie said nothing for a moment, then continued: ‘Anyone can start something…but the real art lies in carrying it through to the end.’ …. Then he looked up at me and said: ‘We will talk again in Addis Ababa.’ My audience was at the end…. Just a few months later, the Ethiopian Empire, which had existed for millennia, was consigned to history,” the author writes.

Despite this moment of tension and ambivalence, Asfa-Wossen, who came from a long imperial line, presents a well-researched, objective, and understanding picture of the emperor, the royal family, and issues surrounding the period. The book is full of inside stories and personal perspectives on the emperor. The author relied on his childhood memories and his knowledge of the milieu of the Imperial rule to paint a picture of Haile Selassie and he also sought the people who knew, consulted, or simply crossed paths with the emperor for a better understanding. In the prologue, he tells us that for decades, he had entertained the idea of writing a book about his great kinsman Haile Selassie, “but I did not simply want to produce a family memoir and a hagiography.” He laments about a paucity of wide-ranging, serious historical biographies charting the life of Haile Selassie. “There are various reasons for this: in Ethiopia, over the past forty years, there has been little inclination to revisit the topic of the Ethiopian Empire and its last ruler. Indeed, the regime that immediately succeeded it was hell-bent on erasing every last trace that period,” he observes.

This is not the first book on Haile Selassie. There are good political profiles such as Zewde Reta’s, Tafari Makonen Rezmu Yeseiltan Zemen ( 2005) and Yekedamwi Haile Selassie Mengist (2012), Angelo Del Boca’s, The Negus: The Life and Death of The Last King of Kings (2012), Ahadu Sabure’s Yekedamawi Haile Selassie Fitsamena Yederg Anesas, Harold Marcus’s Haile Selassie I: The Formative Years (1987), Christopher Clapham’s Haile Selassie’s Government (1969), and Denis Gérard’s Ras Tafari Haïle Sélassié (2006), but this one stands out as the author “exploited a unique advantage: the history of his own family was, for three generations, interwoven with the history of the emperor,” as Thomas Pakenham wrote in the foreword of this book.

Stories and anecdotes related to the author’s father, Prince Asserate Kassa, the son of the venerable Ras Kassa Hailu, a leading politician of the empire, and his relationship with the emperor are ample. There are arguments corrective to the idea that Asserate Kassa was a conservative or even reactionary aristocrat. Rather, his commitment and recommendations for sweeping reforms, following the 1960 failed coup, showed him as a great reformer and open-minded, at times putting him at odds with the emperor. Asserate, who rose to the rank of President of the Senate in 1961, was sent to Eritrea on a new assignment as governor in 1964. His assignment was cut short in Eritrea when the Imperial government declared the controversial marital law seven years later and replaced Asserate with a high-ranking military officer, a move that he opposed fiercely. Asserate came to be appointed as president of the Crown-Council, an important position around the throne that he held until he was arrested and summarily executed, along with many other aristocrats and Imperial officials, in November 1974 when the revolution broke out. (Asfa-Wossen’s brothers and sisters, Rebecca, Teruworq, and Mulugeta, Wendossen, and Kassa Asrate were arrested by the Derg.)

Early Career

Haile Selassie’s early life is illuminated in much greater detail than before. The author begins his story in the final years of Emperor Menelik II when he appointed Ras Makonnen as a governor. Makonnen’s son Tafari, the future emperor, spent his boyhood in Harar and started his education there. While In 1909 Menelik designated his only grandson, Lij Iyasu, as his heir to the throne of the Empire, Tafari was appointed to his father’s governorship of Harar a year later. But Iyasu, a handsome, dissolute and athletic young man, was only sixteen years old when the emperor died in 1913, and he showed himself an unstable successor, contrary to the posed and moderate Menelik. Menelik’s daughter, the childless Zewditu, was crowned empress and Tafari was elevated to the rank of ras, and regent and heir to the throne under Zewditu. “In the meantime, the pact between Tafari Makonnen and Lij Iyasu was destined to be strengthened through familial ties. In 1911, Tafari married Princess Menen Asfaw, a granddaughter of King Mikael of Wollo and a niece of Lij Iyasu. Iyasu had personally engineered this liaison. To enable Menen to marry Tafari Makonnen, he arranged for her divorce from her then-husband, Ras Leul Seged. Yet despite the fact that this was an arranged marriage, the 22-year-old Menen was by common assent one of the most beautiful women at the Addis Ababa court, and the couple was evidently devoted to one another,” writes Asfa-Wossen.

Yet this arrangement could not prevent the impending confrontation between the two cousins. Most accounts hitherto have claimed that Iyasu’s dissolute lifestyle, volatility and violent temper had distracted him from the heavy imperial charge and put him at odds with the aristocracy. But Asfa-Wossen disagrees and instead says Iyasu’s ousting was due to “his grand vision that lay at the heart of his political agenda: namely reconciliation between the Chrisitan and Muslim sectors of Ethiopia’s population. » Ethiopian Muslims, Lij Eyasu, announced had been abandoned and persecuted, and he then continued to make a call for Muslims and Christians alike to “be united through a nationalist sentiment.”  The author then provided an explanation of how that fact had been used by Iyasu’s opponents, including Tafari, to launch an attack against him, alleging that he had converted to Islam and intended to transform Ethiopia into a Muslim state.

The account contains another interesting claim which says that the Allies led by Britain and France who viewed the new direction Ethiopian politics were taking under Iyasu with great suspicion used every means, as he puts it, at their disposal to fan the flames of the rumour that Lij Iyasu had converted to Islam, even going so far as to circulate faked photographs showing the Ethiopian ruler clad just in a loincloth in the manner of a Muslim nomad. “These images, which were passed around from hand to hand in rural regions, achieved their desired effect.”

On 27 September 1916, a group of Ethiopian princes gathered in Addis Ababa under the chairmanship of the defence minister Habte Giorgis and decided to depose the prince. Iyasu, who was in Harar, fought back, he assembled his forces in Harar and marched towards Addis Ababa. But his troops were defeated and he fled into hiding. It was on this background that Tafari Makonnen came to power as regent of Ethiopia, in 1916, and on 3 April 1930, he was elevated to the throne with the title of Emperor Haile Selassie I.

Asfa-Wossen provides an extensive treatment of Haile Selassie’s early career, and of his determination to modernize his feudal empire. The steps the emperor took to promulgate Ethiopia’s first written constitution, to hire a team of Belgian officers to train the imperial bodyguard, to import foreign advisers to supervise educational, legal, and financial reforms. But all his plans were to be cut short by Mussolini’s invasion in 1935, forcing him to flee into exile. As Asfaw-Wossen wrote in the prologue, “Just six years after ascending the throne the King of Kings appeared in Geneva in front of the General Assembly of the League of Nations……the exiled monarch made a moving appeal to the world’s conscience. The words he spoke that day have gone down in history: ‘Catastrophe is inevitable if the great states stand by and watch the rape of a small country.”

Rodolfo Graziani, who served as viceroy from June 1936 to November 1937, had earned himself a reputation for brutality. After an attempt to assassinate him in Addis Ababa, he ordered the subsequent massacre in the capital which continued for nearly three days, and thousands of Ethiopians were slaughtered. In January 1941, after six years of brutal occupation, the Italian armies were defeated and Haile Selassie resumed his reign.

The Restored Empire

The emperor went back to modernizing the state and strengthening his power. He established a centralized system of the provincial administration, with governors appointed by himself. He promoted in his cabinet people of humble origin who showed him absolute loyalty. The best example was Tsehafe-Tezaz Wolde Giorgis Wolde Yohannes who was named Minister of the Pen in 1941, who “remained in this post for fifteen years, growing increasingly powerful in the process. But as his influence grew, so did the deep mistrust of his internal opponents,” writes Asfaw-Wossen.

In 1950, Haile Selassie established the first college-level institution, the University College of Addis Ababa, later Haile Sellassie I University with the Jesuit administrators. With the help and assistance of the United States, the emperor created a national airline for Ethiopia in 1945. After a long and difficult diplomatic battle, the Ethiopia-Eritrea federation was implemented in 1950.

On the basis of careful sifting of evidence, Asfa-Wossen shows how the emperor enjoyed important achievement, in advocating African unity and independence and put himself at the forefront of the pan-African struggle for independence and unity, his alliance with the Allies against the Axis powers during World War II, his role in the Organization of Non-Aligned States. In one of the chapters, entitled “shaking hands with history, 1963 to 1973», the author highlighted how in the 1960s Africa was divided into two blocks, known as the Casablanca and Monrovia groups, Emperor Haile Selassie managed to reconcile the two blocks, which he achieved through the creation of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa. «And the skills in having reconciled the most conflicting opinions was one of the greatest foreign policy triumphs of Haile Selassie. It earned him the soubriquet ‘the Father of Africa,’” Asfa-Wossen writes. “With the foundation of the OAU, Ethiopia was accorded a key position within African politics. And on several occasions over the ensuing years, the position of authority that the emperor enjoyed among the assembled nations of Africa would play a decisive role in resolving conflicts.”

Another of the emperor’s achievements was putting his country on the non-aligned movement, an international organization dedicated to representing the political, economic, and cultural interests of the developing world. In particular, Haile Selassie was impressed by “the policies of the Yugoslavian leader, who had successfully extricated himself from the clutches of the Soviet Union and put himself at the forefront of the non-aligned movement. The two heads of the state became close allies from the first state visit by Marshal Tito to Ethiopia in December 1955. Thereafter they met regularly, and right to the end Haile Selassie referred to Tito as ‘my friend’. The Marshal advised the Ethiopian emperor against keeping all his eggs in one basket – a piece of advice that the latter was all too ready to heed ….”  A core conviction of Haile Selassie was not to rely solely “upon one protecting power, for good or ill, to maneuver adeptly between various parties and wherever possible to play one off against the other.” Again these have been said before, but never so eloquently and in such powerful detail.

In a measured approach and astute contextualising, Asfa-Wossen explains that the Emperor’s legacy was complex, blessed with moments of insight and wisdom but also with that of bad judgment and poor performance. While acknowledging the earlier side of the emperor’s intent on modernizing his country, building schools and hospitals, adopting modern technologies, including aircraft, improved communications, he shows how in the 1950s Haile Selassie came to be regarded as the embodiment of an archaic political institution. The first break in the era of benevolent imperial power came in December 1960, when a dissident wing of the army led by the commander of the elite Imperial Bodyguard, Mengistu Neway, conspired to overthrow Haile Selassie while the emperor was on a state visit to Brazil.

‘The Stolypinists’

The attempted coup failed but Asfa-Wossen writes that in, ”So it was that, after the abortive coup in Ethiopia, a growing number of people in the emperor’s inner circle reached the conclusion that something fundamental had to change if the country’s monarchy was to be saved.” They included many of those had commanded the loyalist forces and defended the Crown against the insurrectionists in the dark days of December 1960, including Ras Asserate Kassa, Lieutenant General Abiye Abebe, who was also interior minister and the governor-general of Eritrea, and the defence minister Lieutenant General Merid Mengesha, colonel Tamrat Yigezu, the minister for social affairs and later governer-general of Harar, and the minister of information Dejazmatch Germatchew Tekle-Hawariat. In one of the author’s most interesting insights, we learn how their discussions resulted in a ‘Memorandum to His Majesty’….. under the headline ‘Our loyalty compels us to recommend some timely reforms to your Majesty.’ In this memo, they warned that the ‘trust and support of the people might continue to ebb away,’ and of ‘the danger of revolution increasing.’ To prevent this from happening, the signatories called for a root-and-branch reform, especially in the realms of bureaucracy, the parliamentary system, the economy and social welfare, and the organizational structure of the army. In conclusion, they listed seven concrete demands, including a revision of the constitution, a widening of parliamentary rights of scrutiny, and a duty of accountability to parliament on the part of the prime minister. »

The authors of the memorandum were later termed ‘The Stolypinists’ –by the British ambassador, Sir John Russel who served in Addis Ababa from 1962 to 1966 – an allusion to the Russian statesman Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin, who introduced an agrarian reform program at the beginning of the 20th century that he hoped would shore up imperial Russia.

“Haile Selassie showed the memorandum to his prime minister, and Tsehafe-Tezaz Aklilu Habte-Wold must have encouraged His Majesty in his conviction that he should reject the suggestions. Even though the premier may well have been of the same mind as the signatories of the memo on many matters, he saw it primarily as an attempt by aristocratic forces to relieve him of his office by the back door and seize control of the post of the prime minister themselves.”  That’s certainly debatable. The fact that the emperor rejected the suggestions could not be contested but the claim about prime minister Aklilu’s position with the use of “may well have been” could be problematic. For one thing, the emperor on matters of important issues would have consulted other loyal people such as Ras Mesfin Sileshi, Mekonen Habetwold, or his eldest daughter, Princess Tenagnework but of course Aklilu also. The fact of the matter was Aklilu was pushing for the reform as much as the others. As Abera Jembere wrote in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: Volume 1, Aklilu in 1961 submitted to the emperor radical proposals, which included constitutional, judicial, and land reforms and the enactments of liberal laws on local administration, the civil service, pensions, employer, and employee relations, etc. Of course, it was not March 1966 that some of these were implemented, and the Prime Minister received the power to select other ministers. Aklilu’s cabinet were commoners yet intellectuals and technocrats such as Ketema Yifru, Mammo Tadesse, Minasse Haile, Tesfaye Gebreezgi, in contrast to the tradition-bound aristocrats.

The author says after the 1960 coup, the aura of imperial omnipotence was shattered and for the remaining fourteen years the regime was living on borrowed time. ”But in the interim,” Asfa-Wossen observes, ”things had reached a stage where the emperor was no longer judged by what he had achieved but by what he failed to do. For Ethiopia was still one of the most economically backward countries in the world. The per-capita gross national product stood at just US$83 in 1973, one of the lowest in the whole of Africa. Average life expectancy was thirty, and 60 percent of all newborn children died before they reached their first birthday. In almost all statistical measures of international development, the Ethiopian Empire found itself in the last five places.”

The emperor’s downfall in 1974, though promoted in part by famine and worsening unemployment, was due more to a failing system. “Shouldn’t the Ethiopian dignitaries have seen this disaster looming? Were they living in an ivory tower?” the author asks rhetorically. And then he went on to narrate an incident that occurred in the palace at Massawa in Eritrea in the late 1960s, as told to him by the Ethiopian author Mammo Wudineh. “The chief of the Ethiopian police, Brigadier General Tadesse Birru, was paying his respects to the then Governor-General of Eritrea, Ras Asserate; Mammo was accompanying Tadesse at the time as a journalist. Ras Asserate and General Tadesse fell to discussing the country’s future, in the gloomiest of terms. In 1960, both men had played a key role in putting down the palace revolt staged by the Neway brothers. Now the general posed the question: ‘When the earth finally receives our bodies, will we be worthy of it?’ The Ras’s response was unequivocal: ‘Why should we be? No, the earth should not receive our mortal remains! We are divided amongst ourselves and all we can think of is destroying others’ work. This country is descending straight into a chaos that can never be made good.’ And he added: ‘Yesterday’s events [i.e. the 1960 putsch] will come back to haunt us tomorrow!'”

As the years went by, the chances of reform slipped, paralysis had settled on the palace and the capital. The author relates what his father had gone through towards the end, as The Lion of Judah was no longer able to tackle the fundamental reforms that the country required. In 1972, when the Emperor celebrated his 80th birthday and 42 years of his reign, Asserate went to the palace to offer his congratulations-then suddenly fell at the emperor’s feet. Lying there, he begged for one favour. ‘Please say this to your subjects: « My beloved people of Ethiopia. I have served you for almost sixty years. Now the time has come for me to abdicate… Here is my son, into whose care I commend you.”

The emperor was visibly moved and said nothing for a while. Then he told Asserate to get up, and replied: ‘Tell me, did King David abdicate…We shall reign as long as the Almighty allows Us to. And when the time has come for Us to depart,  He will know what is best for Ethiopia.’ »

Asfa-Wossen’s biography is not just a portrait of Hailselassie, but the story of the 20th century-its upheavals, promises, and terrors. This makes for a very good read and provides much substance for debate.

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