Oliver Benjamin
on the radio. And so man’s most important ancestor got her name
from a thinly-veiled paean to the hallucinogenic drug LSD. Which
was just as well. At that time many people thought LSD would
provide a path to Eden. It had been an era of many optimisms.
Later the same year that Lucy’s bones were found, the bones of
Emperor Haile Selassie vanished. After being deposed and removed
from his palace during a military coup, the last remnant of the
Solomonic Dynasty disappeared. His remains were never found and
the oppressive new government washed their hands of the matter.
Rastafarians took this to be proof that Selassie was indeed God—he
had ascended to heaven just like Jesus Christ.
The next eighteen years would be the worst the country had ever
known. In the iron grip of the Dergue, what was once the most
respected, heroic and open country in Africa closed its doors, literally
starving, bombing and torturing its own people into submission
while the world looked on helplessly or not at all.
In 1992 a successful revolution forced Mengistu into exile in
Zimbabwe and one of his old servants finally revealed to the press
where Selassie’s bones had been hidden all those years: After
personally strangling him in 1974, sadistic and demented Mengistu
buried the former emperor’s body inside the Royal compound,
directly under a toilet.
Haile in the sty with demons.
As Roy stood there in the National Museum, staring at Lucy, he
thought about the bones of his ill-fated former lover. He had no idea
where they were buried. And the boy who may or may not have been
his son. He hadn’t the slightest idea where they were.
4. Harrar
The travelers arrived in Harrar by nightfall.
“It took Rimbaud three months to walk across the Afar desert to
get to Addis Ababa,” Roy said, “We just did it in a couple hours. How
things have changed.”
“But the experiences he must have had!” Webele said, “In the
Afar, nothing has changed in eons.”
“Do they still make necklaces of each other’s testicles?”
“Of course, it is much better that we flew.”
227
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