(Long Read) The Land of the Lion, The Last Emperor - The Story of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Part 1

‌Starting today, I will begin sharing the story of Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie, and his connections to Korea.
I hope you find it an enjoyable read.
The Land of the Lion, The Last Emperor
Haile Selassie and 100 Years of Ethiopia
Prologue — The Red Coffin
On the morning of November 5, 2000, Addis Ababa sat under a clear sky of the dry season. November in this highland city is the season when the rainy season ends and the air becomes most transparent. From early in the morning, people were out on the roads around Meskel Square, and merchants had folded their stalls to move toward the sidewalks. The police had set up cordons, but they seemed to lack enthusiasm. This was because the Ethiopian government had designated the event not as a state funeral, but as a private one.
Veterans with Lion Manes
The procession departed from Bata Mariam Church. Four warriors walked in front of and behind the vehicle carrying the coffin. They were dressed in headgear made of lion manes and carried shields and spears—the attire of the Battle of Adwa from a hundred years ago—and some of them were actually from the last generation of the Imperial Guard. The coffin was draped in the Ethiopian flag. The emblem embroidered on the flag depicted Saint George piercing a dragon on one side and a crowned lion on the other. The Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The beast that the kings of this country had claimed as their own for three thousand years.
The procession made a large loop through the city and stopped in front of St. George's Cathedral. The significance of that cathedral in this city was special. Exactly 70 years ago, in that very spot, the man in the coffin donned the crown of the King of Kings. On that day, dukes of the British Royal Family, marshals of France, and royalty from Italy sat before the cathedral, and journalists from around the world flocked to report on the African coronation. Now, he had returned to the same place. This time, lying down, and in a surprisingly small coffin. His remains had been discovered eight years ago by workers digging up the concrete floor of the office in the National Palace. It had been 17 years since his death.
The final destination was Holy Trinity Cathedral. It was a building he had commissioned himself during his lifetime, and inside, the tomb he had ordered remained empty for half a century. It was a sarcophagus carved from red granite, shaped neither in a European style nor like those of any other African royal house. It was modeled after the ancient obelisks standing in northern Aksum. In the shape of the coffin, he had left a record of where he came from. There was another identical sarcophagus beside it. It belonged to his wife, Empress Menen Asfaw, who passed away first in 1962. The two sarcophagi still stand there, identical in form.
Thousands gathered in the cathedral courtyard. Although the government drew a line stating it was not an official event, people came on their own accord. The elderly wept. There were also pilgrims who had flown in from all over the world. Rastafarians from Jamaica, London, and New York. To them, the figure in this coffin was not a deposed monarch but a God descended to earth, and perhaps even his death 25 years ago had never actually happened.

▲ Old veterans guarding the Emperor's final moments and grieving women
One Life, Many Faces
It is rare for a single person's life to be interpreted so differently. To the younger generation of Ethiopia, he is a feudal oppressor who starved the peasantry; to some elderly people, he is the last emperor who protected the nation; to people in the Caribbean, he is a God; and in international political history, he is an exiled leader who appealed for collective security against fascism. And to Koreans, he is the ruler of the only African nation that sent ground troops.
These many faces are contradictory, yet they are all true. This book is not an attempt to resolve those contradictions, but an attempt to show that within those contradictions, the whole of 20th-century Africa is contained. The story must begin three thousand years ago, in the royal palace of Jerusalem.

▲ Emperor Haile Selassie, (Times, 1936)

1. The Queen of Sheba and Her Descendants
   The Story After the Bible
   In 1 Kings, chapter 10 of the Bible, there is a passage where the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon. She tested the king with difficult questions, and the king answered them all. The queen was impressed, the two exchanged gifts, and the queen returned to her own country. The biblical narrative ends there. The story of Ethiopia begins exactly at this point.
   There is a book called the "Kebra Nagast," which was compiled in the 14th century and translates to "The Glory of the Kings." It is the national epic of this country and its de facto foundation myth. According to that book, the Queen of Sheba did not return empty-handed. Ethiopians call her Makeda. Makeda returned to her country pregnant with Solomon's child, and that son's name was Menelik.
   As a young man, Menelik went to Jerusalem to meet his father. Solomon welcomed his son and intended to give him even half of his kingdom, but Menelik said he would return to his mother's country. When he left, the firstborn sons of the elders of Israel accompanied him. And they brought the Ark of the Covenant out from the Temple. The core of this story is that it was not stolen, but that God allowed it to happen. God's presence left Jerusalem and moved to Ethiopia, thus making this highland nation a new Zion.
   The Priest Guarding the Ark
   The Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes that the Ark is still kept within the grounds of the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in northern Aksum. Only one guardian priest is allowed to see it, and from the moment he is appointed until his death, he does not step outside the walls. Not even outsiders or the Patriarch can see it. Every church in the country enshrines a replica of the Ark, called a Tabot, in its sanctuary; without a Tabot, a building is not recognized as a church, no matter how magnificent it is. In this country, the essence of a church is not the architecture, but the box contained within.
   Historians, of course, hold different views. Solomon is a figure from the 10th century BC, and the Aksumite Kingdom was established much later. There are also no records of the kings of Aksum claiming to be descendants of Solomon.
   The "Kebra Nagast" is literature, not a genealogy. However, the power of myth lies not in whether it is true or not, but in what it was able to achieve.
   
   ▲ King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Makeda
   The Beginning of the Solomonic Dynasty
   In 1270, an Amhara regional lord named Yekuno Amlak raised an army and overthrew the last king of the Zagwe dynasty. Objectively, this was a usurpation. However, he did not call his act a usurpation; he called it a restoration. His logic was this: the legitimate dynasty of Ethiopia is the Aksumite royal line, the descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Zagwe were interlopers who were not of the Israelite lineage, and he was merely reconnecting the broken legitimacy.
   It is estimated that the "Kebra Nagast" was compiled about forty years after the death of Yekuno Amlak. In other words, this myth is a story organized late by the dynasty to justify its rule. For a story created out of political necessity, it has survived excessively long. From 1270 to 1974—seven hundred years. No European dynasty lasted this long. And its last successor was Haile Selassie.
   Genealogy Written in the Constitution
   There is a point that must be emphasized here: this myth did not remain merely as a metaphor into the 20th century. In the revised constitution promulgated by Haile Selassie himself in 1955, there was a clause stating that the Emperor inherited the lineage of Menelik I, who was born between King Solomon of Jerusalem and the Queen of Sheba of Ethiopia, without interruption. In an era of radio, airplanes, and the United Nations, a genealogy from the Old Testament was explicitly stated in legal text.
   In this point lies the first key to understanding the figure of Haile Selassie. He was a modernizing monarch who built schools, created a constitution, and abolished slavery, but the basis of the authority he used to push those reforms was drawn from a three-thousand-year-old myth. He preserved pre-modern legitimacy using modern tools. This combination worked surprisingly well for a time, but ultimately led to his downfall.
   
   ▲ The Coat of Arms of the Solomonic Dynasty
   The Ethiopian Orthodox Church
   Alongside the myth, the church forms the backbone of this country. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church became the state religion in the 4th century during the reign of King Ezana of Aksum. This was almost the same time the Roman Empire recognized Christianity. It is the only Christian church in sub-Saharan Africa that has existed since before the colonial era, and today it has the largest number of believers among the Oriental Orthodox churches.
   This church is quite different from the Christianity we know. They observe both Saturday and Sunday as holy days, perform circumcision on male children, and distinguish between permitted and forbidden foods. Because the traces of the Old Testament remain exceptionally strong, some scholars say the Christianity of this country is like a cousin to Judaism. Fasting days amount to over a hundred days a year for laypeople and over two hundred for clergy. That long tradition of fasting has produced world-class vegetarian cuisine. If you sit down for a meal in Addis Ababa on a Wednesday or Friday, there is a high probability that your companion will not eat meat—not out of rudeness, but out of faith. The calendar is also different. The Ethiopian calendar is about seven years behind the Gregorian calendar, and the New Year begins in September. The start of a day is not at midnight, but at sunrise. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that this country has lived on its own time.
   Independence After Sixteen Hundred Years
   However, this proud church had one strange deficiency: for sixteen hundred years, it had not been able to appoint a native of its own country as its head. The Abuna, the head of the church, was always an Egyptian cleric dispatched by the Coptic Church of Alexandria. While the country had never succumbed to Europe, the church was in foreign hands.
   Haile Selassie sought to change this. In 1942 and 1945, he demanded the independent consecration of Ethiopian bishops at the Coptic Church synod, but was refused. He even pressured them by stating he would sever ties. Finally, an agreement was reached in 1948, and in 1951, a cleric named Gebre Kiyonos became Abuna Basilios. He was the first Ethiopian head in sixteen hundred years. And in 1959, when Pope Cyril VI of Alexandria appointed him as the first Patriarch, the Ethiopian Church gained complete autonomy.
   This event did not become international news. However, at the very time the African continent was winning political independence from Europe, Ethiopia itself broke a sixteen-hundred-year-old religious dependency. To Ethiopians, this is one of his most deeply remembered achievements.
   The church and the dynasty supported each other. The king had the right to rule because he was a descendant of Solomon, and the church guaranteed that lineage. The church maintained its authority and owned land under the protection of the king. This union lasted seven hundred years and was severed all at once in 1974. One of the first things the Derg did after overthrowing the Emperor was to strip the church of its state religion status and nationalize church-owned land. They knew exactly what had sustained this system.

• To be continued in Part 2 -