LIKE all Ethiopian royalty, curly-bearded Emperor Haile Selassie traces his ancestry back to the match between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. His Semite-Hamite blood lines show in his stern jaw and aquiline nose. But in practical fact, his hold on the Ethiopian throne has been due less to ancestry than to his ability to outplot Ethiopia's best plotters.
He 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...
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