On the birthday of the Emperor, the journey worth remembering is not one of his own. It is his mother’s made before sunrise, on muleback, through the forest between Harar and Ejersa Goro.
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Forty-Three Kilometres
On the birthday of the Emperor, the journey worth remembering is not one of his own. It is his mother’s — made before sunrise, on muleback, through the forest between Harar and Ejersa Goro.
Everything that followed — Geneva, Kingston, Washington, Madrid, Persepolis; the aircraft and the collars and the golden keys of foreign cities — begins on that road. It is worth starting there, because the world remembers the son’s arrivals in other people’s countries and has largely forgotten the one journey that made them possible.
The counting of the losses
Woizero Yeshimebet Ali Abba Jifar was the daughter of Dejazmach Ali Abba Jifar of Wollo. She had married Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael, governor of Harar, cousin to Emperor Menelik II and a man who would within four years be among the architects of the victory at Adwa. She had also, by the record that survives, endured eight pregnancies that did not give her a living child.
That number is not a footnote. It is the whole meaning of the song the women griots sang when at last a healthy boy was born:
Read against the eight losses, the couplet stops being flattery and becomes arithmetic. The griots were not saying that one child of this woman outweighed fifty children of another. They were saying that this woman had counted to eight in grief, and that the ninth had answered all of it. It is one of the most economical things ever said about her, and it was said by women, in public, on the day.
Why Ejersa Goro at all? Because Harar — garrison town, seat of government, thick with the business of a province — was no place to bring a ninth pregnancy after eight sorrows. The choice was for air and quiet and a change of mood. Waiting there was the wife of Fitawrari Nadawe, commander-in-chief of Ras Makonnen’s army, who had offered her compound as a lying-in house and had assembled midwives of her own.
And the travelling party was itself an argument. Yeshimebet’s sisters and their friends had come down in numbers from Wollo to attend her. Wise women were selected for the journey, among them, by the memory held in the family, Woizero Desta — mother of Dr Malaku Bayen, who would grow up to become the Emperor’s physician and his envoy to Black America, the man who carried Ethiopia’s cause to Harlem when Italy invaded. The best-known midwives available were brought. At five in the morning, before light, Ras Makonnen’s soldiers went ahead to open the road — men who within four years would be counted heroes of Adwa, Amba Alagi and Mekele, and who on this night were escorting a woman to her confinement.
She rode in the middle of all of it. They went left of her, right of her, and behind her, through the trees, in the dark.
Kidane Mehret
The child was born on Hamle 16, 1884 in the Ethiopian calendar — Saturday, 23 July 1892. It was the day of Kidane Mehret, the Covenant of Mercy, and the coincidence was not treated as one. As emperors and empresses took patron saints, so this boy took Our Lady of the Covenant of Mercy, and kept her: the church he would later raise inside his own palace in Addis Ababa carried her name.
They buried the umbilical cord, as is done, and over the place where it was buried they built a church, and the church is St Kidane Mehret at Ejersa Goro. There is something exact in that. The cord is the first thing severed and the first thing returned to the ground; to build over it is to say that a person begins at a particular point on the earth and that the point can be marked. Whatever else the man became — Ras Tafari, Regent, Negusä Nägäst, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and to millions across the Atlantic something more than any of those — he began in a compound at Ejersa Goro, on a Saturday, at a place now under a church floor.
Two years later, or thereabouts, Yeshimebet was dead. She had made her journey, borne her ninth child, and did not live to watch him grow. Her mother and her sister Woizero Mammit raised him. The Wollo women who had come down the forest road to help her deliver stayed to bring up her son.
The arrivals
What that boy then did with the world was, in the most literal sense, to travel it.
In June 1936 he arrived in Geneva, at the League of Nations, a sovereign whose country had been overrun with aircraft and mustard gas, and told an assembly that would not lift a finger that the fate of a small nation that day would be the fate of the great nations tomorrow. He was correct within three years. The speech did not save Ethiopia. It made him, for a generation of anti-fascists on every continent, something close to a living conscience — and it put the phrase collective security into the mouth of a man whom Europe had assumed would be its object rather than its author.
From Geneva he went into exile, and the country that took him in was the one that had failed him. He reached London in June 1936, and the British government found his presence in the capital politically embarrassing — appeasement was in the air, and a dispossessed African emperor in Knightsbridge was an inconvenient reminder of what the democracies had declined to do. So he went west, to Bath, drawn there for rest and, it has been suggested, for treatment of the mustard gas burns on his hands. Consider that. The sovereign who had stood at Geneva and told Europe what chemical weapons do to a people was carrying the evidence on his own skin.
In September 1936 he bought Fairfield House, an Italianate villa on Kelston Road, for three and a half thousand pounds, and moved his family in that October — an Ethiopian court in exile in a Roman city, keeping the fight for Ethiopian independence alive from a suburb of Somerset, with Sylvia Pankhurst among his allies and a grey horse called Poppy in the grounds. He lived there until Ethiopia was liberated and he went home in 1941.
In May 1954 he arrived in Washington and addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, then crossed the country — Princeton, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans — in a progress no African head of state had made before. He returned in 1963, and again in 1967, and again in 1969, and to the United Nations at twenty-five in 1970, and a last time in 1973.
On 21 April 1966 he arrived in Kingston, and something occurred for which protocol had no provision. The crowd that met the aircraft was not a crowd of officials. He gave the movement’s elders gold medallions bearing the Ethiopian seal, the only such gift of the visit; Rita Marley saw him pass in the motorcade and her life changed course. Ethiopians may make of Rastafari what they will — the Emperor himself was an Orthodox Christian to the end and never claimed what was claimed of him — but the fact stands that a man born at Ejersa Goro became, in the Caribbean, the visible sign that Africa had never been conquered. Jamaica keeps the day. They call it Grounation.
And in 1971, at seventy-nine, he made two journeys that between them say everything about what the throne had become. In May he arrived in Madrid, where General Franco met him at Barajas with full military honours, the mayor gave him the golden keys of the city, and the two of them exchanged their countries’ highest collars — the anti-fascist icon of 1936 decorated by the last surviving victor of Europe’s fascist wars, a thing neither man mentioned. In October he arrived at Persepolis for the Shah’s celebration of twenty-five centuries of Persian monarchy, and there, by protocol, he was the guest of honour: the senior sovereign in a tent city full of kings. Two of the oldest continuous monarchies on earth stood together in the desert. Neither survived the decade.
The Garter
But there is one more journey, and it is the one that closes the circle with Britain.
In October 1954 he came back — not as a refugee this time but as a head of state, the second guest of Elizabeth II’s new reign. He sailed from Malta to Portsmouth aboard HMS Gambia with his son the Duke of Harar, was received at Victoria Station by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, and was carried by carriage procession to Buckingham Palace, where he stayed. And there the Queen conferred on him the Most Noble Order of the Garter.
It is worth being exact about what that is, because it is easily said and rarely understood. The Garter is the senior order of chivalry in the British system, founded in the fourteenth century, in the personal gift of the sovereign alone, its foreign members admitted under the statutes’ quaint title of Stranger Knights. There is nothing higher for Britain to give. He was later installed at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He gave in return the chain of the Order of the Seal of Solomon to the Queen and the Order of the Queen of Sheba to the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Duke of Harar was made a knight grand cross of the Royal Victorian Order.
Then, on 18 October, he went back to Bath. The city gave him the Freedom — the highest honour in its power — and paraded him through streets where people had known him as a neighbour; and he slept again at Fairfield House, refurbished for the occasion, with local people gathered at the gates to cheer a man they had last seen as an exile. Four years later, in 1958, he gave the house away. He handed the freehold to the Corporation of Bath in gratitude for the welcome the city had shown him, on condition that it serve as a home for old people. It did precisely that for thirty-five years, and the house stands today as a museum to him and a gathering place for Bath’s elderly African-Caribbean community. Of all the monuments raised to Haile Selassie anywhere in the world, that one — a shelter for the aged, given in thanks — may be the one that would have pleased Ejersa Goro most.
He returned to Britain for the last time in 1972, and he went to Windsor, to St George’s Chapel, for a ceremony of the Order of the Garter. He had been a refugee in that country and a knight of its highest order, and at the end he went back to the chapel where they had installed him. It was among the last foreign journeys of his reign.
Two years later the throne was gone. He was deposed in 1974 amid revolution and the exposure of famine, held in his own palace, and died there in August 1975. The Tribune does not print hagiography, and the argument over what the last years of that reign cost Ethiopians is a real argument that Ethiopians are still having. But the argument belongs to other days. This one belongs to the birth.
The return
Fifteen years ago a company gathered at Ejersa Goro, at the church of St Kidane Mehret built over the buried cord, to keep the birthday where it happened: Crown Prince Zera Yacob; Abuna Yared; the late Ato Abera Moltot of the Emperor Haile Selassie Memorial Foundation; Leke Khant Abate of the Ethiopian Patriots’ Association; and Rastafarians who had come, as Rastafarians do, a very long way.
They had all, in their fashion, travelled the forty-three kilometres.
Because that is the shape of it. The mother made one journey and it was short and it nearly killed her and she died soon after. The son made a hundred journeys and was received by presidents, emperors, dictators and congresses on four continents, was given the keys of foreign cities and the freedom of an English one, and was made a knight of the oldest order of chivalry in Europe by a queen whose government had once wished him quietly out of London — and every one of those receptions was in some sense a receipt issued against her forty-three kilometres. Modern Ethiopia, African unity, the idea that international morality might be something a small nation could demand rather than merely hope for, the craft of diplomacy as Africa’s instrument and not only Europe’s — all of it can be argued back, along the road, through the forest, to a woman on a mule who had already buried eight hopes and was riding through the dark with the ninth.
Happy birthday, Your Majesty. And may the memory of Woizero Yeshimebet Ali be a blessing.
