Archive - August 11, 2024

John writes — In the final days of our in-country Peace Corps training in Ethiopia, we had a celebration dinner at the Guenet Hotel in the Populari section of the capital, Addis Ababa. The Guenet Hotel, even in 1962, was one of the older hotels in Addis Ababa. It wasn’t in the center of town, but south of Smuts Street and down the hill from Mexico Square, several miles from where we were housed in the dormitories of Haile Selassie I University. While out of the way, this small, two-story rambling hotel, nevertheless, had a two-lane, American-style bowling alley, tennis courts, and a most surprising of all, an African lion in its lush, tropical gardens. At that time in the Empire, no Ethiopian was allowed to keep a lion, the symbol of the Emperor, Haile Selassie, whose full title was “By the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty Haile . . .