“It was among these people, at Ejarsa Gora – and not, as most record books have it, at Harar – that Lij Tafari Makonnen, later to become Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, was born on July 23 1892.
In May each year, the boy’s father, Ras Makonnen, Governor of Harar, took his family and retainers to Ejarsa Gora to escape the stuffiness, the typhoid and other disease which stalked the streets of the walled city of Harar at this time of the year. Here on a green hillside that looked down on the fertile valleys, he had built a large mud-and-wattle house with a refinement that was unusual in Ethiopia at the time (…). In 1892 he came early because his wife, Waizero Yashimabeit, was with child and he hoped that the fresh breezes and clear air woud help her pregnancy to go well. She was the wrong mould for shaping children, and eight of her offspring were stillborn or had died from the diseases lurking in Harar for susceptible infants. So this time she and her baby must be given every chance.
For Ras Makonnen wanted a son (…) So Waizero Yeshimabeit was cosseted at Ejarsa Gora until her time came (…) Ras Makonnen had the son he craved, and there was raw meat, heady drink and two nights of singing, boasting and wenching to celebrate it. (…)
Less than two years later, Waizero Yeshimabet was pregnant again, and this time she died in child-birth.“
(Taken from “Haile Selassie. The Conquering Lion”, L.Mosley, 1964)
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“A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.” (Revelation 12, 1-6)
“Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD.” (Isaiah 54,1)
“Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring”. (Revelation 12, 17)