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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I was born as Lij Tafari Makonnen on July 23, 1892, in the town of Ejarsa Gora in the Harage Province, some 18 miles outside the city of Harar, Ethiopia. Lij Tafari was given the religious name, Haile Selassie. He was the son of Ras Makonnen, Governor of Harar under his kinsman, Emperor Menelik II. Ras Makonnen, a Shoa Amharan noble, was married to an Oromo, Yashimabet, who died two years after Lij Tafari’s birth.1
His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I, wearing the sash of the Order of Solomon's Seal. The top star on his tunic is also the Order of Solomon's Seal, beneath which are stars of the US Chief Commander of the Legion of Merit (left), Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Trinity (centre right), and the Order of Emperor Menelik II (below).
Click on the image for an enlargement.In a significant break with precedence, Lij Tafari Makonnen was raised with an understanding of world affairs, and with an exposure to the outside world. He was to become the first Emperor of Ethiopia to have traveled extensively abroad.
Ras Makonnen, and therefore Lij Tafari Makonnen, were directly of the Solomonic Line, as was Emperor Menelik himself and Tafari Makonnen’s great-great grandfather, Negus Sahela Selassie, of Shoa. King Sahela (Sahle) Selassie had already made treaties with foreign states, including Queen Victoria’s Britain.
Lij Tafari Makonnen was, unusually for the period, brought up with both a strong education in Shoan Amharic traditions and in Western history, languages and statecraft. He was named Dejazmatch — literally “keeper of the door”; the equivalent of the title of Count in Western terms — for part of Harage province at the age of 13, in 1904, only about a year before his father’s death.
The governorship of Harar, and the army which went with it, went to another — Tafari’s half-brother, Yelma — when Ras Makonnen died, and Lij Tafari Makonnen was named to the lesser governorship of Selale. But, because of palace politics, he was forced even to administer this governorship from the confines of Emperor Menelik’s palace in Addis Ababa, where he learned first hand the art of political manoeuvre. Emperor Menelik, one of Lij Tafari’s supporters, suffered a severe stroke in 1908, and Tafari was “exiled” to the southern frontier area where he served as governor of Sidamo province. There, however, he had an army of 3,000.
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