The Story of
Amha Selassie

I was born, depending on who you ask, on different dates. The main thing was that my parents were married for almost twenty years before they had a child. So it was a big surprise that I was born, and everybody was delighted. Everybody pampered me in my childhood.

My father was a big man—physically and in standing. He was highly respected in the community, dedicated to helping others and promoting new ideas in Axum. He started out as a young man, appointed at an early age as a tax collector for the city. The position gave him contacts across every segment of society—governors and administrators, merchants and traders, the church hierarchy. Over time, he gained experience, connections, and a reputation for fairness.

Two of the outstanding things he did: when the emperor came to Axum, my father stopped his motorcade in the middle of the street. The bodyguards hustled him, asking who he was. The emperor stopped the car and said, what is this about? My father told him that Axum, one of the oldest cities in the country, had been neglected—there was no hospital, only a clinic. The emperor instantly agreed. Two years later, the hospital was built. It is still standing. He also organized a group to meet the emperor in Addis and ask for a high school. My father was the spokesperson. The emperor ordered it built, and it was.

I remember one day very clearly—two people were beating each other up, and one of them took a knife out. The bystanders started screaming because one was going to kill the other. My father came out and they asked him to intervene. He looked at them, called them by name, and said, stop. Both of them froze. He said, what do you have? One said a stone. The other said a knife. The third said a pistol, which was unheard of at that time. They brought everything out and put it in front of him. He said, come. I want you to make peace, and you will start now. Whoever made the mistake says I am sorry, and the other accepts it. And they did.

One day, a gentleman was coming to the house. As he came to the door, he changed the way he was wearing his gabi—the way you drape it tells a story, it signals deference. My father jumped out of his chair and ran to him, and they started struggling. What had happened was, the big man was wearing his gabi in a way that showed respect, lowering himself. And my father was saying, no, you are too big—you cannot do this in my house. I will not allow you to put yourself below me. It was like fighting for the restaurant bill. These small things meant a great deal.

My mother was a very nice lady—a housewife who did not go out of the house. Everybody came to her, but she rarely went anywhere. Sometimes she would go see her elder sister, and that was about it. She stayed home and entertained everybody and was kind. Her father was a very forceful man, a man of pride—he was the mayor of the city for quite a long time. Her mother was from outside Axum, from another big family.

Decades later, when she visited me in Washington in 1985, she was alone in the apartment while I was at work. She watched the soap operas during the day. One evening, a young woman came to visit and they started discussing the characters—this one is not dependable, that one did such and such. My mother followed the stories perfectly, even though she did not understand a word of English. After watching long enough, she had it all figured out—who was dependable, who was the cheat. You do not need the language.

The house was a family center. Everybody was there. People came all day long. There was laughter and arguments and entertainment and eating and drinking. Hosting all sorts of people—everybody had to get something. If it was a small child, they gave him a small loaf of bread or some treat. For important guests, the finest they had. There was no wine or whiskey in those days, not even bottled beer—just local beer, and tea and coffee. But everybody got something.

The Occupation

When the Italians invaded in 1935, my father went to fight. While he was away, they harassed my mother—searching the house, finding an Ethiopian flag painted on the ceiling decorations. She was terrified. But a young Eritrean interpreter, translating for the soldiers, whispered to her in Tigrinya: whatever they ask you, say no. They will tell you they know things—they do not. Be calm, be strong, do not panic. He saved her.

When my father came back, they arrested him and sentenced him to forty lashes. A guard warned him privately to be prepared. But the head of the church in Axum, who was related to my mother, went to the Italians and said, this is my son—you gave him a promise, he came, how can you do this? My father did not know about this intervention. The day he was supposed to be whipped, they told him he could go home. He was even afraid it was a trick. But later he understood that the priest had interceded on his behalf.

The Lowered Door

My great-grandfather was a contemporary of Emperor Yohannes. One day the emperor entered his house on horseback. The horse destroyed the bamboo floors—in those days, if you were a person of means, they laid bamboo on the floors. My great-grandfather was so offended that the next time, he lowered the height of the door so nobody could ride in again. He could not say no to the emperor directly, but he could lower the door.

As a result of all this, my father was respected and loved and honored. That was very clear to me growing up, because everywhere I went, people deferred to me and recognized that connection. I did not fully understand it then. But later I started understanding—it was because of his position, his personality, his efforts.

One person who had a big influence on my learning was the governor of Axum, who later became the Bishop of Tigray. When I was six or seven years old, he used to see me in church and took interest in me. One day he told me that if I came to church on Sundays, I would have breakfast with him. This was intimidating and exciting at the same time—intimidating because I did not know what to say to him, and exciting because it meant I would ride in a car with him in the morning. That was something not available to any child.

During breakfast, I would sit at the table with him—something out of the ordinary, because he was a governor, and only a few adults were allowed to sit at the same table. He talked to me like a friend—about the importance of school, how to carry on conversations, table manners. He was different from other adults. At that time, children were not allowed to answer back even when they were spoken to. When he traveled to Asmara or Addis Ababa, he brought books for me.

One morning a soldier came to breakfast—very distinctive clothing, very intimidating. He sat next to me and started asking questions. Later that day, my father told me he was Colonel Isaias, the governor of the neighboring region. Years later, when I was working at the Ministry of Interior, I told General Isaias about that breakfast. He was happy to hear the story. He was one of the sixty people executed by the Derg.

The Road to Asmara

I was six or seven years old the first time I went to Asmara. There was a big incident on the way. The bus we were on went over the edge of a cliff. Two-thirds of the bus was hanging, about to tumble down. But for some miraculous reason, it had stopped over a bridge, and the pavement of the bridge caught the back tire. The bus was just hanging there. The story was that my father was getting ready to throw me out the window—just take your chance before you tumble down. It was instinct.

What I remember most is what happened next. The next car that came was carrying the Archbishop of Tigray, who had been the governor of Axum when I was growing up—a big personality with his own car and driver. When he arrived and saw me, he wept. Because it was a miracle that we survived. He kept saying it was the angels of this cave that saved everybody. Then he gave my father and me a ride to Asmara in his car. The others had to follow by the next bus. I remember that part much more than the incident itself. The car was a Dodge—everybody said Dodge. It was a big thing. Nobody knew exactly what it was, but everybody knew it was a big car.

Leaving Home

Over the years, I have heard countless stories trying to convince me that our family descends from the tribes that came with Menelik to Axum two thousand years ago, tracing the names of ancestors generation by generation. Is it true? That is another question. But people believe it and act as if it is true. The word they use is fugo—the source, the original. Nobody is above them.

My grandmother was still alive when I was growing up. One of the things I remember clearly is that her uncle went to Addis. Her brother went looking for him and stayed. Another brother followed and stayed. Her sister went looking for all of them and she stayed. For my grandmother, Addis was a place that took everybody and never returned them. When I told her I was going, she was furious—blaming my father for letting me go and get lost. It was only when I went and came back a year later that she was relieved, because she had not expected to see me again.

She used to tell us that when she was a little girl, there was a game the children played. The game said: may your children go to Shewa and Gondar, and your grandchildren disperse everywhere. She used to say, I have come to see that my children went to Shewa and Gondar, but I am not sure what is meant by "your grandchildren disperse everywhere." She wondered about that. Now, I think, she would know exactly what it means.

My mother was horrified when I first left home. I was fourteen years old, and we had to go to Mekelle for high school. She was praying all year long that I would fail my exams and stay another year. In the class before mine, only one or two had passed. In my class, only six out of thirty or thirty-five passed.

Wingate

At Wingate, I was admitted only because of a connection to the British ambassador. The headmaster had refused—students were accepted at the tenth grade, not the twelfth. But when my brother-in-law mentioned the ambassador's name, the headmaster's attitude transformed completely. From seriously saying no way to suddenly welcoming me. I still remember the transformation. That is how the world works.

One of the most important things at Wingate was that the deputy director asked if I wanted to learn English literature. The teacher was an Englishman teaching Macbeth—acting it out with the English accent and everything. I had no idea what I was into. By the end of the year, I knew what literature was, what plays were, how to read books. The main texts were Macbeth, Animal Farm, and Cry, the Beloved Country. Our teacher wanted us to read Moby Dick. We had no idea what whales were, no sense of the sea. The problem was always context—we knew nothing of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, who Stalin was. It was taught in a kind of blindness. But you go along—you pick up a few things here, a few there.

I was the first person in my family to go to college. When somebody said he passed the matric, it was a big deal. A telegram came from a family friend congratulating my father—they did not actually know my results, but they assumed, because I was from Wingate and Wingate students passed. The dropout rate was brutal: only a third of freshmen would graduate in four years. If you slipped for one moment, they threw you out.

I graduated from college having studied political science, so I thought the Ministry of Interior would be a natural fit. I applied, and a general's family helped put me in contact with some people. They said okay, and then suddenly it dried up—next week, two weeks, nothing. One day I went and waited for the personnel director. He took me to his office and said, I am going to tell you something. Do not tell anyone I told you. They do not want to hire you because you are Tigrayan. They are making excuses about the budget, but that is the main reason. He was Oromo himself.

The rejection did not end my career at the Ministry. I was eventually placed in its most central department, the Agra Gazaz—which literally translates as "ruling the country." It oversaw developmental issues, traditional administration, security reports from the provinces, and served as the main liaison with the governors. My first boss was one of the old French-educated generation from before the Italian occupation. He understood the entire system and taught me everything—what was happening, why it was happening, who was who. He could see things behind the official façade.

One of the good things about me, I think, was that I was not a threat to anyone. I was not competing or pushing. And because I started taking notes at meetings, they kept calling me to the next one, and the next. I knew the connections, the contradictions—I could tell them, this cannot be done because you said no before. That information became valuable, and they wanted me there.

The two factions—the old nobility and the rising class of educated bureaucrats—had fractured, and nobody had fully taken control. The emperor, as he aged, could no longer play both sides. From our desk at the Agra Gazaz, we saw all the traffic—governors writing to ministers, ministers writing back, both hoping we would support their case. It was contentious, competitive, sometimes close to insulting.

I had two experiences that showed me the old order was finished. The Minister of the Interior, after receiving an impossible directive from the emperor's secretariat, said: we are not able to do this job. The only thing is we do not know how to pass it to you young people. The Minister of Land Reform said something similar: we are trying to keep this together, but I do not think it can be done anymore. You could sense it. People knew something was going to happen. They just did not know what.

When the Prime Minister resigned in 1974, it was unprecedented. He invited all his ministers and the Crown Council to meet with the emperor. The emperor walked in and said, what do you say? The Prime Minister said he was requesting to retire. Everybody was stunned. The ministers were sitting there learning they were losing their jobs. It had never been done before.

The new Derg went to the emperor and said, Your Majesty, we see problems in this country, we are your servants, what can we do to help? They started asking that this be done, that be done. Then they started arresting people—first the progressives, then the nobility. By July, many were imprisoned.

By this time, many of my bosses had already left—early retirement, transfers to the provinces. Junior people like me were moved up. The Derg members themselves were strangers to each other—policemen, soldiers, air force, artillery—with no common thread. Nobody knew who they were in the beginning, which was their advantage. They did not come in trying to change everything. They wanted to learn. They were not in a position to do otherwise. One misconception is that the Derg started arresting people. They did not. The previous government had been arresting people. The Derg simply added to it. That point is almost completely forgotten.

A new minister was appointed—someone I knew from my earlier days. He called a staff meeting and invited everyone. When I walked in and stood by the door because all the seats were taken, he saw me. He called my name and asked me to come sit next to him because there was an empty chair. That did it. To the other people, that was the message. That was everything. It said, without saying anything or doing it deliberately, keep your hands off him.

The Killing of the Sixty

The defining moment was the killing of the sixty. Let me start on the Saturday. At about six-thirty in the evening, I was entering our compound and met my neighbor, a major in the army. He was fully dressed in his military outfit—unusual for a Saturday evening. I jokingly said, oh, now they are putting you as a guard somewhere? He laughed. Then he said, are you staying home? I said yes. He said, stay home this evening. Do not go out.

Half an hour later, he called and said, tell my wife that I have arrived safely. That was strange too. Around eight-thirty, a friend called and asked if there was gunfire in our area. Our house was across the street from the palace—the office of the Derg, where the prisoners were detained. He said there was a lot of gunfire. I said I heard nothing. Then the telephone stopped working. We went outside. There was nothing. It was as quiet as it could be. The guards were the same number of guards. Guns mounted on cars at the gate, as always. No change. So we went back inside and went to bed.

The next morning, early, one of the neighbor's daughters—she was about three or four years old—came running to our room. She was saying, my father is crying, my father is crying. I said, what happened? She said, Ras Mengesha is dead. There was no way a child that age could know that name on her own. We turned on the radio. That is how we learned.

There were sixty people altogether. I knew about forty of them—people I could salute on the street if I saw them. What would be the equivalent here? There is no equivalent. Whatever sixty people you collect, it is not going to have the same impact. When I later looked back at the violence that came, something struck me: in other conflicts, soldiers did most of the killing. But in our case, it was friends, neighbors, schoolmates who were participating. That was what made it so devastating.

I had applied for a scholarship a year before the fall of the imperial government. The minister had written a letter to the Dutch Embassy recommending me. Then, at the end of July 1975, I got a call. The lady said, congratulations, your scholarship has been approved. I had practically forgotten about it. I was not sure whether it was a prank call or a real call. I asked for her number and called back. When the Dutch Embassy operator answered, I said to myself, it is real.

The problem was: how do you leave if the government does not allow you to go? The Minister of Interior was a friend of mine. I told him the opportunity had come. He said, are you sure? I said yes. He said, do not tell anybody—leave, and leave very quickly.

A friend connected me with the head of reservations at Ethiopian Airlines. He issued me a ticket without payment, on the promise that I would return it when the Embassy's ticket came through. He made it open—if the next plane was going to Nairobi, I could go to Nairobi. If Egypt, Egypt. He kept a seat open for me. That ticket sat with me for about a month until the real one came.

I decided to go to Axum to say goodbye to my family. The day after I arrived, the bank in Axum was robbed. Armed men came into town in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody knew who they were—there were suspicions it might be Eritrean guerrillas, but someone later recognized one of the men as a friend from Axum. That was the beginning of the TPLF in action, though it was too early for most people to know what it was. My parents were scared. I took the plane back to Addis the next day.

When I was getting on the plane to leave Ethiopia, I was worried until it left the ground. There were stories of people being pulled off planes after boarding. The plane landed in Asmara to collect passengers for Khartoum and Cairo. Somebody called my name. I heard it and did not stand up. For a minute I thought, this is it. But nobody came looking. They closed the door and we started taxiing. I did not believe it until we landed in Khartoum.

The Hague

This was my first time outside Ethiopia. The Institute for Social Studies in The Hague had students from sixty-six countries. You learned about the world for the first time. Indonesians, Filipinos, Israelis, Palestinians—they argued furiously, because one would tell their version of the story and the other would contest it. These personal encounters were more educational than any class.

By the first year, people I knew were getting shot on the streets in Addis. During my second year, it became clear it was dangerous to go back. I got a letter from my father. They did not write directly—indirectly, they would tell you what they meant. The letter said: it is a good thing that your time is coming up and you are finishing school. But remember, this is a chance you cannot get again, so make sure you get more education and do not rush to come back home. That is the wax and gold.

Toward the end of the second year at ISS, my papers and scholarship were about to expire. One of my thesis advisors came back with a plan: finish your paper now, and I will review it. But the other professor is going on sabbatical, and we will say he could not review it on time. We will ask for an extension. I said, can that be done? He said, if it is our fault, what are they going to say to you? So they extended my scholarship for another year.

I finished my work and had nothing to do for the next year. So I spent my time traveling Europe. In England: London, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford. In Germany: Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne. Italy from Milan to Naples and Venice. Then Austria, Switzerland.

When my diploma came and the real reckoning arrived, I still did not know what to do. My papers in Holland had expired. One morning at the school, I picked up an application for a seminar in the United States. I would have probably put it back and left. But one of my professors came along and said, are you going to apply? I said I would if he wrote me a recommendation. He took me to his office, sat down at the typewriter, and wrote it while I sat there.

A week after I mailed the application, I got a letter back. I was expecting it to say we have received your application and will process it. No. The letter said: Dear Mr. Selassie, your application has been accepted, and you are expected in two weeks. It was completely unreal. I did not plan for it. I did not hope for it. It just fell on me.

I never expected I would stay in America.

At the seminar in Connecticut, I was struck by the wealth of the area—lakes, big houses, well-maintained lawns. I said to one of the professors, "You know, this is a beautiful area." He said, "Be careful. This is not an asset. This is a postcard version of it." I still remember that. Later, I understood what he was talking about.

After the seminar, I learned there was a job at Georgetown—writing a Tigrinya-English dictionary for the School of Linguistics. It was four or five dollars an hour, unstressful, something I knew well. That gave me my first sense of stability. I applied to five graduate schools and was admitted to all of them, but once Georgetown accepted me, I decided to stay. I was tired of moving—especially moving without knowing what was going to happen next.

At the cafeteria one day, I noticed someone who seemed important—people deferred to him when he walked by. He was a dean. One day I sat with him at lunch and said, "I don't have much money. I don't know how I'm going to manage." He said, "Don't worry about it. Let me see what I can do for you."

The job at the Overseas Development Council came by pure chance—someone at a party knew of an opening. My boss, Jim Howe, said something I will never forget: remember, you are a student first. This job is not important—the important thing is your school. Then he made a proposal that changed everything: think about turning the work you do here into papers for class. So I did my homework while I was getting paid. He gave me more and more responsibility. The first job was to read four newspapers every morning—the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor—and collect the articles I thought were relevant. That was one of the best educations I had.

My father passed away in 1983, when I was in Washington. He was seventy-eight. I was not able to go back for the funeral—it was during the Derg, and I did not have the papers. Jim saw me one day, looking down. He came to me and said, if you want to go home and you do not have the money, we will buy you the ticket. That was very touching—willing to commit thousands of dollars for someone who needed it. I cannot forget that.

Through that job, I met extraordinary people. Father Hesburgh. Robert McNamara. Henry Kissinger. Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor of Germany. Edward Heath, the former Prime Minister of England. I remember all of them—not because I sought them out, but because they were there, and when you are in the room, you are part of the conversation.

I met a man named Molson who was one of the richest men from Canada. One day at lunch I said, "You know, you are the richest person I have come across." He said, "Wait a minute. John, John, come here." A man named John came over. He turned to me and said, "Now you are standing next to a rich person." They both laughed.

After Georgetown, I needed immigration papers. When Chase Manhattan and Bank of America recruited me, they realized I had no green card. My professor Chester Crocker, who had become the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, wrote me an affidavit. My asylum was approved quickly. Then a desk officer at the State Department called—his boss wanted me to help with the refugee situation. The people applying for asylum did not know how to tell their stories—how to express their fears and experiences. Some exaggerated, some could not articulate what had happened. It felt good to see people getting approved—to know they would not live in permanent fear of being deported.

The head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement once asked me: why do Ethiopians come to Washington? I said it was the perception that the capital meant opportunity, the large black community where it was easier to blend in, and the service economy that did not require papers to get started. Once people started coming, the next ones followed. He said something I have never forgotten: the concentration was good for the first generation, because it gave them social support. But it was bad for the second, because the children would grow up in the shadow of the old world—not enough of their parents' culture to sustain them, not enough of the larger society to belong to. Looking back, I think he was right.

Thirty Years

I spent over thirty years working for the DC government on health policy and hospital oversight. When Johns Hopkins was applying to acquire Sibley Hospital, I sent them ninety-six questions. I was told they were furious. When they invited me to Baltimore, I said, I apologize I could not come up with four more to make it a hundred. They laughed. After that, they became very cooperative. I knew all the council members, the mayors, the directors. They all opened their doors, and I could talk to any one of them at any time—much more than they were talking to each other.

Mayor Barry—whatever he did, he did knowingly, for a purpose. One day he said: I understand the bureaucracy is bloated. I understand there are people who cannot do their jobs. But these are citizens who have not had a chance to improve themselves. I want them to live in a middle-class family so that their children will become somebody. Why should we pay them welfare sitting at home when we can have them do something and learn? In the rational sense it does not make sense, but in the sense of justice and the next generation, it makes evident sense. And every time he saw me, he asked about the kids—what are they doing, are they going to school? He knew his stuff.

Our first house was in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northeast D.C.—upper middle class, very settled. The people were very kind, helpful, and welcoming. We became part of the community from the beginning. The block parties were organized by the ladies of the neighborhood. People had lived there for two or three decades and raised their children there.

Fenote

We never told the story of how I met my wife properly, so here it is. A friend went to Canada one day in 1986, and when he came back he said, I found someone—I will introduce you. He brought photographs of a woman named Fenote. Her family were businessmen who used to come to our house when I was little, though I do not remember that. Her father came to see me at the Ministry two or three times. Her grandfather was our neighbor, and two of her uncles went to school with me. So we were not strangers. That was in September of 1986. I went to Toronto in October. She came to Washington for Christmas. We went to New York for New Year's, and that is when I proposed—during the holidays.

I had every opportunity to pursue an international career. My boss became the director of UNICEF. I met officials at the United Nations and the World Bank. They all tried to help. But nothing materialized. I think what happened was I was dealing with people very high in the hierarchy, and that is not where things happen. Things happen in the middle. I remember there was a study done on working conditions at the World Bank, and the conclusion was that except for the pay, everybody was miserable. Knowing what I know now, I would do it this way. I would have spent my time moving everybody from place to place, changing schools, changing neighborhoods. I do not think it would have been worthwhile.

For me, a person who came from the backwoods of Africa, they accepted me at the highest level. I do not think I would have had this opportunity anywhere else. I was very fortunate.