betrayal. “I couldn’t control my feel-
ings,” Berhane said. “I still can’t get it
out of my mind.”
A
biy’s residence—a modernist man-
sion, with exercise machines on
the lawn—is surrounded by relics of
Ethiopia’s contested history. It sits at
the foot of a hill where Emperor Me-
nelik II, who ruled from 1889 to 1913,
built his royal compound. Menelik was
a canny, brutal Amhara who beat back
the first Italian conquest of Ethiopia
and went on to expand his empire by
using European firearms against rival
ethnic groups. He also brought the
country its first automobiles, postal ser-
vice, and electrical and telephone lines.
The palace where Menelik lived is
also where Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile
Selassie, grew up. Known as the King
of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe
of Judah, Elect of God, Selassie was
hailed as the culmination of a dynasty
that, according to legend, had begun
with the union of King Solomon and
the Queen of Sheba. He became a fig-
ure of global renown in 1936, when, after
Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, he gave
an eloquent speech at the League of
Nations, to warn of the rise of Fascism.
Selassie was a crucial proponent of the
anti-colonial pan-African movement
and a vocal opponent of apartheid who
was personally acquainted with Mao,
de Gaulle, and Queen Elizabeth II. He
was especially close with the U.S., and
made state visits to every President from
Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon;
in October, 1963, John F. Kennedy drove
with him past cheering crowds in the
back seat of a gleaming convertible.
At the height of his reign, Selassie
built the Jubilee Palace, downhill from
his former home. One afternoon, Abiy
took me there. The palace, he explained,
was the centerpiece of his Addis Ababa
renovation. In the basement, he ush-
ered me past armed soldiers and through
a doorway. Stretching out his arms, he
announced, “This is the gold room.” It
was filled with ornaments: goblets, can-
delabra, a pair of ornately carved thrones.
Abiy opened a cabinet and handed me
a hefty plate. With a thrilled look, he
said, “Everything in here is gold.”
Abiy’s curators had catalogued more
than two hundred thousand artifacts
from the palace, and concrete-block
storehouses had been erected to protectthem during the restoration. There were
globes of every size; elephant tusks; more
thrones; the Emperor’s clothes, includ-
ing white Chelsea boots and his uni-
form from the Second World War. Abiy
gestured to an antique exercise bike and
joked, “They thought only people now-
adays worried about their weight.”
In the garages was the Emperor’s
car collection: two hundred vehicles,
from a horse-drawn hearse to antique
Bentleys. Abiy pointed out an ar-
mor-plated Cadillac limo—believed to
be among the last cars that Selassie
bought before his overthrow—and
guided me into the back seat. It had
blue carpet, and a special footstool, cus-
tomized to imperial specifications. (The
Emperor was not a tall man.) Abiy
gazed at Selassie’s seal—a crowned lion
wielding a flag—and marvelled, “Ev-
erything has his emblem. Do you see?”
The last known photograph of Se-
lassie, taken at the moment of his ar-
rest, shows him a slender man of eighty-
two, with erect posture and a clipped
beard. He is standing on the palace
steps, surrounded by military officers,
just before he was humiliatingly forced
into a VW Beetle.
Under arrest, he was taken up the
hill, back to the palace where he had
spent his childhood. He died there, in
his bedroom, in 1975, allegedly mur-
dered by Mengistu’s security chief.
Mengistu secretly buried Selassie un-
derneath the floorboards of an office
nearby, apparently exulting in walking
over his body.
Abiy seems to regard Selassie as the
ultimate validation of Ethiopia’s claim
to national grandeur. But the Emperor
is a complicated icon. To his admirers,
he is the crucial unifying figure in the
country’s modern history. To detrac-
tors, he was an Amhara nationalist who
brought about unity by squashing dis-
sent and making Amharic the official
language of the bureaucracy.
By developing the grounds, Abiy is
reclaiming Ethiopia’s imperial past. For
years, Selassie’s compound was closed
off, and Ethiopians were afraid even to
approach its outer walls, for fear of trig-
ger-happy guards. Now a zoo occupies
the space of a former military prison.
Abiy is having a new palace built, up
the hill from his current residence.
When it is complete, he said, he will