Word: tafari
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Haile Selassie remained in power so long that few of his countrymen can remember the days when he was known as Ras (Duke) Tafari Makonne. The son of the governor of Harar province in eastern Ethiopia, Tafari was distantly related to Emperor Menelik II and was educated at the court in Addis Ababa. After Menelik's death in 1913, the nobility decided that the Emperor's grandson, Lij (Count) Hasu, was too dissolute to take over the throne. They installed Hasu's mother Zauditu, as Empress, and chose Tafari to be her regent and heir...
...time, Tafari brought the Empress under his control and imprisoned Lij Hasu, who was kept in chains for the next 19 years. In 1928, Tafari forced the Empress to crown him King, and two years later, when she died mysteriously, he became Emperor. It was then that he took the name Haile Selassie, which in Amharic means Power of the Holy Trinity. According to Ethiopian legend, he was 225th in a line of Emperors that extends back almost 3,000 years to Menelik I, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba...
...four of his six children. His son, Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, disappointed his father by cooperating in a 1960 coup attempt and, though since forgiven, enjoys little rapport with the Emperor. Indeed, there are few even in the palace circle who can remember when the Emperor was Tafari Makonnen, the young regent to his empress aunt, who took the throne in 1916 when Nicholas II still reigned as Czar of Russia and Lyndon Johnson was in the fourth grade. He went on to win the world's admiration with his grave defiance of Mussolini's legions...
...plotted his own way to the throne. Back in 1916, he was only an ambitious young ras (marshal) named Tafari in the eastern province of Harar when he teamed up with a female cousin in a plot that toppled the playboy Emperor Lij Yasu. Ras Tafari pursued the fugitive Lij Yasu for five years, caught him, threw him in prison and kept him bound in golden chains for 14 years until he died in 1935. Though his cousin became the Empress Zauditu, Ras Tafari gradually emerged as the country's strongman. Upon the Empress' death...
Corporal &Marshal. Meanwhile in Italy every newsorgan which reported the doings in London spoke, of Haile Selassie by his family name, "Signore Tafari." However, nobody much bothered to read the papers. All Italy was rapturously celebrating the return from Ethiopia of its Conqueror. His skin seemed suntanned to the toughness of leather. Moist upon it were the kisses of Benito Mussolini as II Duce embraced and smacked on both cheeks grizzled, tough, triumphant Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Viceroy of Ethiopia...