Few Traces of Haile Selassie Remain : Ethiopia’s King of Kings Is Now Just a Memory

Menelik Palace on the panoramic Entoto hilltop nine miles north of the Ethiopian capital was once the splendid home of Ethiopia’s greatest warrior king.

It is now an off-limits army barracks and the site of a large radar installation overlooking a patchwork plain 5,000 feet below.

Nearby, nestling in stands of pine and rolling hills, stands the church of Entoto Raguel--built 102 years ago as a personal place of worship by King Menelik II.

Inside the church is a shrine with a magnificent, octagonal painted screen covered with scenes from the Bible and pictures of the revered royal line.

Church Ties

Menelik himself is depicted taking his royal staff from Raguel, the home-grown Ethiopian patron saint.

Close by is a picture of Menelik’s successor, pasted onto the screen much later: Ras Tafari Makonnen, crowned in 1930 Emperor Haile Selassie (literally “Power of the Trinity”), Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Elect of God, King of Kings of Ethiopia.

Haile Selassie, like Menelik, cultivated the closest relationship with the church. He institutionalized his earthly divinity in the first Ethiopian constitution of 1935, claiming direct lineage from the biblical union of Solomon and Sheba.

The deposition of his corrupt dynasty in September, 1974, was popular. The original revolutionary intention, which never quite came to pass, was to replace him with his son, still alive in London but at that time a sick man in Rome.

Military Autocrat

The emperor’s picture, once compulsory in all public places, has been replaced by a new military autocrat: President Mengistu Haile Mariam, chairman of the Provisional Military Council.

Except for nationalizing church lands--along with everybody else’s--Mengistu has never tried to challenge or break the moral authority of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

A traffic island close to Addis Ababa’s main cathedral of Georgis (St. George) is plastered with socialist slogans, but 100-yards-away Christian city folk merely passing the small oval church genuflect in the street.

The pious throw themselves upon the heavy doors, kissing feverishly at the brass-bound hardwood, muttering prayers and supplications to St. George, slayer of the dragon of evil and a favored saint of the warrior Menelik.

Royal Lions

Most traces of the Ethiopian monarchy have been wiped out by Mengistu’s Marxist state. The elite of the imperial aristocracy mostly died in the revolution or fled.

True, symbolic royal lions still top most of the carved stone pillars at the entrances to the old palaces, now used by the ruling military council.

A huge stylized stone “Selassie” lion stands in a central square near the chunky, socialist-realist, worker-soldier monument given the Ethiopians by fraternal East Germany. Presumably the great beast was too heavy to be moved.

But not so the large beaten metal equivalents that dotted erstwhile royal property. Half a dozen stand junked next to cages holding the dozen remnants of the king of king’s own live collection of the king of beasts in what is now a small public zoo.

The caged lions look ragged and sad.

Daughter Jailed

Haile Selassie’s closest relation in Ethiopia, his daughter, languishes in jail, a frail woman of 72, along with half a dozen more distant relatives. Ethiopian officials pretend that they have never heard of her.

Some diplomats point out a wide ditch on the edge of the prison grounds.

Beneath the turf are buried the bodies of 59 top officials of Emperor Haile Selassie, shot summarily at night in late November, 1974, by revolutionary army units two months after he was deposed. Selassie died the next summer under close arrest in his palace.

His constitution was suspended, and 11 years passed before Mengistu felt able to substitute a new one.

The present draft, currently under debate by the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, breaks a cornerstone of Ethiopian society--two millennia of independent kingship.

But the new socialist document still reflects the imperial glories of the savage 19th-Century King Tewodros, of Menelik and Selassie.