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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 to the throne.
In no 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.
Imperial Gestures. In his early years as Emperor, Haile Selassie launched a drive to build schools, highways and railways. He granted a new constitution in 1955 that promised Ethiopians equal rights under the law. In the 1960s, he turned Addis Ababa into a modern city. Yet Ethiopia remained a desperately poor land, whose 26 million people still have one of the world's lowest per capita incomes: $80. As discord grew in the land, the aging Emperor seemed incapable of dealing with it or even understanding it. In early 1974, when an army mutiny for higher pay led to a wave of disorders in the capital, the Emperor handed out wads of bank notes to beggars, seemingly unaware that such imperial gestures were no longer effective.
For a while after his overthrow, there were rumors that the new, increasingly leftist military government intended to execute the old Emperor, or allow him to go into exile in exchange for the hoard he was said to have in numerous Swiss banks. Instead, he was permitted to spend his last days in Addis Ababa under an easy house arrest. Servants still addressed him as "Your Imperial Majesty." As recently as last December, he remarked to two foreign visitors, "I can convoke my ministers, generals and relatives whenever I like." After all those decades of absolute power, the old man apparently could not grasp that he had been rendered absolutely powerless.