By Habtamu Nini Abino
Few lives join the two great currents of Ethiopian history as directly as that of Princess (Le'elt) Aster Fikre Selassie. Through her mother, she is a great-granddaughter of Emperor Haile Selassie I and a princess of the Solomonic Imperial house. Through her father, she descends from the Moti—the kings—of Leqa Naqamte, the Oromo royal house of Wollega. Her story is at once a genealogy, a tragedy of the 1974 revolution, and a reminder that Ethiopia's royal past was never the possession of one people alone.
A child of the Imperial house
Aster Fikre Selassie was born in April 1960, the fourth of six children. Her mother was Princess Ijigayehu Amha Selassie (1936–1976), the eldest child of Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen—later proclaimed in exile as Emperor Amha Selassie I—and Princess Wolete Israel Seyoum, through whom the family also descends from the line of Emperor Yohannes IV. Aster's siblings were Samson, Rahel, Meheret, Bekere and Yishaq; in exile, their grandfather Amha Selassie formally created all six as Princes and Princesses of Ethiopia.
The other inheritance: Leqa Naqamte
Her father, Dejazmach Fikre Selassie Habte Mariam, was the heir of Leqa Naqamte, the kingdom centred on Nekemte in Wollega. That royal line runs as follows:
- Bekere Godana, who founded the Leqa Neqemte state in 1841 and ruled until 1868, the first of its kings to establish Nekemte as his capital.
- Moroda Bekere, his son, who succeeded him and made Nekemte the capital of the kingdom.
- Kumsa Moroda (born 1859), Moroda's eldest son and the third and last Moti, who ruled from 1889 to 1923. As a young man, he was sent to the court of Emperor Menelik II at Entotto, where he was baptized into the Orthodox faith with the Emperor himself as his godfather, taking the baptismal name Gebre Egziabher. Under Kumsa, Nekemte prospered — the Russian explorer Alexander Bulatovich, who visited in March 1897, described its marketplace as "a very lively place" of many languages and peoples — even as central authority from Shewa was reimposed.
- Dejazmach Habte Mariam Kumsa, Kumsa's eldest son, who succeeded his father and ruled from 1924 to 1935. When Italy invaded in 1935, Habte Mariam answered Emperor Haile Selassie's call and raised the troops of Leqa for the northern front; during the occupation, Nekemte, under his guardianship, sheltered the "Tikur Anbessa" (Black Lion) resistance cadets who had fled from the Holeta Military School.
- Dejazmach Fikre Selassie Habte Mariam, Habte Mariam's son — the last of the line to govern Leqa Naqamte, in 1955–1958 — who married Princess Ijigayehu and so united the two houses in their children.
Revolution and loss
Aster was fourteen when the Derg deposed her great-grandfather in September 1974. Her mother was imprisoned on 11 September 1974, the day before the deposition, and died in Akaki Prison on 23 January 1976, aged just thirty-nine, after medical neglect. The children, kept under surveillance but not imprisoned, buried her at the Ketchene Medhane Alem Church in Addis Ababa. Early in 1977, Aster and her siblings escaped from Ethiopia and joined the Imperial family in exile, which centred on London and the Washington, DC area. Her father survived eight years of imprisonment and died in August 1996.
A living bridge
Princess Aster has lived a private life in exile, and no public career is recorded. Yet her very existence carries a historical argument. In one person, the blood of the Solomonic emperors — Haile Selassie and Yohannes IV — meets the blood of the Oromo kings of Leqa Naqamte: Bekere, Moroda and Kumsa, whose line was bound to the Imperial crown first by Menelik's godfatherhood at a baptismal font in Entotto, and a generation later by marriage. Ethiopian history is often told as the story of separate peoples. The life of Aster Fikre Selassie tells it differently—as one intertwined national story, written in two royal houses at once.
