This rejection by fellow Africans, never gave the Amhara ruling class a second thought. Haile Sellassie & Co continued with their merry- time & celebrations, to the end of their time.
It has been said that old habits die hard and sure enough, even the so called revolutionary government of
Mengistu Haile Mariam, in the true tradition of old Ethiopia, continued the same immorality to the extent of importing plane loads of bottles of Whisky, directly from the factory in Scotland at a cost of millions of dollars as it happened during the celebration of the founding the Ethiopian Marxist Party, and this while millions of Ethiopians were dying from hunger in Tigray and Wollo that left Ethiopia to be synonymously associated with hunger, forever and to eternity.
The children of the ruling class had also adopted every conceivable foreign habit, to the hilt. Their dress, straight from Italy; after shave for the boys and first class fragrance for the girls, with no import tax added and directly from Paris; the music, as a rule, classical composers such as
Bach, Mozart, and
Schubert, and after a hefty alcohol is consumed,
Elvis and
the Beatles . Sometimes when one of them suddenly realized the presence of black color in him or her,
The Temptations will be included.
Otherwise it was all white musicians and I must add this rule was always strictly observed, if not openly. The ruling class kids only act and seem to worship the locales (
Buzinesh Bekele, Telahun Gessese, Alemayehu Eshette... so on and so forth), when contact with the Working class became unavoidable which didn't happen quite often.
Otherwise they were a world unto themselves, isolated in the high walls of their mansions.
This worshiping of Elvis & Co, at one point almost created a diplomatic incident. As the story that was then rotating in Addis Ababa had it, one of the Palace girls wrote a letter to ELVIS that includes "I love you and all that."
Elvis replied curtly by saying
I hate to have a black latch for my shoes, much-less to desire a love from a darkie girl in far away land.
The content of Elvis's letter in time came out, and reached the working class. The ruling class were very enraged; not so much from Elvis reply but the fact that the content reached the downtrodden, unvarnished. Thus to show their machismo, or else it may end up being interpreted as weakness by the worshiping faithful in the working class world, the palace Chamberlains went onto the attack and expressly instructed the most notable artist in town,
Afeworki Tekle, to send Elvis a patriotic Ethiopian shock.
Mr. Tekle drew the picture of Elvis as he was being attacked by a merciless pitbull, whose body color was of pure charcoal and buying at Elvis's [deleted] as he was squirming and trying to get away to save his life.
What was not known by the palace girls, was the fact that Elvis was an FBI informer and a friend of
Richard Nixon; thus his derogatory feeling about the black color something to be expected. Pity the palace girls and their ignorant adventure, for they knew not what they did. Aside of this type of minor inconvenience that happens from time to time, over all, life was good for this bunch of indolent boys and girls. Little did they knew that their world of endless consumption and continuous merry time of partying was to end in a crushing halt, as power was violently transferred to what they considered for so long as non-entities: Captains and Sergeants. In short the world of Mengistu's Marxist power.
