On Lulu
saying goodbye is difficult
‘Day and night His Majesty thought only about his people. He was always thinking how to develop them. I have such a deep emotion when I think of him.’ Mammo Haile looked away. ‘His Majesty had a special way with dogs. If we were traveling and he saw some stray dogs he would say, Mammo Haile, please round up those dogs! I want to give them breads. His Majesty’s favourite dog was Lulu.’
I had seen a picture of Lulu sitting in the emperor’s lap while he stroked her with his small, feminine hands. She was a tiny, frog-eyed Chihuahua.
‘If there was a reception Lulu would go round among the legs of the officials. If one of them was holding a bad feeling about His Majesty, Lulu would touch the man’s foot and that was how His Majesty knew. One minister was very popular but Lulu touched his foot and after that no one trusted that man again. Lulu was a very brilliant dog.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Paul killed her.’
‘Paul?’
‘Big palace dog. Like a big fighter, like a wrestling man. He took Lulu by the neck and shook her and shook her. She was only a tiny dog—and finito! Lulu finito. Such a tiny little dog.’ He looked down, toeing the ground with his shoe. I thought he would cry.
‘It was only a year or two after that when they took His Majesty away.’
- Philip Marsden, 2005
We lost one of our family dogs this past weekend. Cheeseburger — named by my kids — was an absolute goblin of a bulldog mutt that we adopted from a rescue organization four years ago. The old fella had acquired some unseemly habits living on the street that he had a tough time shaking; untrainable and seemingly arrogant about it, as if Cheese was aware that he was on borrowed time and would do what he wanted when he wanted.
I prefer to think about him rolling on his back each night during lullaby time in his favorite room in the house: my daughter’s, who the toothless geezer was put on this earth to comfort. It took awhile for them to find each other.
Cheese was by my side every day as I worked on this weirdo project that is, from my understanding, still on its way to becoming a book in 2025. I spent at least 2-3 hours per day reading new material or re-reading old interview transcripts, which meant that it’s been impossible to avoid the albatross that hangs over any and all Rastafari work. I have thought about Haile Selassie more than a person should in the 21st century, particularly a person who does not live in the Amhara state or have Shewan relatives.
I considered it (still consider it) part of the process, I guess. Empathy for Rasta must involve at minimum a genuine understanding of not just its materialist origins, but a nontrivial assessment of the factors that reinforce Rasta Belief. Lij Tafari Makonnen has been dead for quite some time, yet the faith lives on and its cultural power is embraced in Addis Ababa and Amhara. Shashamane is limping, but is not dead. Meanwhile, in Kingston, the image of HIM is so prominent in murals and stickers and posters and signs that the House of Solomon might as well relocate there. To write that cultural power off as mere “cult of personality” for the last Negus of the Solomonic Dynasty is not just shallow analysis, but materially nonsensical.
Thus, I’ve spent months next to a giant wheezing bulldog that should’ve died years ago while reading random stories about esoteric details. My favorite stories involve the most universally relatable thing about Haile Selassie in the West. Not the Christianity, or the charisma, or the stoic dignity. It’s even more universal than the stuff that can easily be recognized in any Western chauvinist heroic stereotype: His Majesty loved animals, particularly dogs. His favorite was a chihuahua named Lulu.
Lulu was given to the emperor by a British military man on a state visit. As the man told it, Haile Selassie was delighted to have a lap dog, and the chihuahua’s first act upon being set down was to urinate on the rug by the royal throne. In yet another example of otherworldly pithiness, the Conquering Lion laughed and said that by pissing on his carpet, Lulu showed they were already comfortable in his empire.
The night that we brought Cheese home, he broke out of his sturdy iron crate (did not know they could do that) three times using pure brute force. Each time, he left a significantly sized clue for me to find on his way to his favorite room. My daughter excitedly brought him back to me in the hallway — she had gone to bed prior to me arriving home with the dog — and told me that he must have really wanted to meet her. How can I be mad at that? I got a bungee cord the next day so I could brace the door closed.
Lulu never left Haile Selassie’s side and is consistently one of the funniest presences in all official photography of Haile Selassie. The juxtaposition of the theatrical dignity of Tewahedo and Solomonic tradition and then nearby there’s always this little bug eyed fancy dog keeping watch. Divine humor.
As a writer and researcher, I’ve had to “analyze” the Haile Selassie phenomenon with animals from an objective perspective. I’ve had to consider how the master of public perception used his dogs (and his lions) for propaganda and PR purposes. It’s not exactly an antiquated concept: here in the United States, the public was informed of the Obamas search for a dog, George W. Bush adopted a cat during Iraq, Joe Biden’s dogs tried to eat President Xi Jinping, etc. Pets are a way of humanizing inhuman power mongers who are, by virtue of seeking power, inherently offputting people.
I’ve had to consider how stories about Lulu reinforce aspects of Haile Selassie’s public persona that are questionable, such as his “gentle” nature. I would talk about it out loud with Cheese. What do you think man, you think this is a crock of shit or what, I mean he’s in the middle of a civil war taking pictures with puppies and kangaroos. Cheese never answered, but if he could, I think he might have asked me if I could maybe talk about something else. That’s how it goes with book brain, Cheese, sorry man!
Every time I’d feel silly about the level of detail I was studying, I would remember the American political charade around pets and the “First Family” and remind myself that a “perfect example” for the nation’s people only feels foreign. The Democratic Party just had a convention where a bunch of people in a stadium held DOUG signs for a guy named Doug that, 30 days ago, nobody on Earth gave a shit about. Why? He’s married to a lady that people want to win the presidency — who also is a person nobody really cared about until mid-July. The understudies are now the stars of the production, so they’re the two most important people on Earth to millions of liberals. Go figure.
Conversations with Cheese about various decisions by Haile Selassie were a daily occurrence as I avoided thinking about the parallel parasocial politics unfolding in my own country in 2024.
Cheese, you’re not gonna believe what the big fella did in the 1960s. He gave the West the end around AND he played China against Egypt!
Alright, Cheese, I got bad news: this Cold War dualism stuff doesn’t work for this story, and now I don’t know what the hell to think about Cuba.
Each time the answer from my dog was the same. That’s fine. I like quiet work.
Aside from my time with Cheese, time spent with Rastafari were the only conversations with people who would talk about Tafari Makonnen like he was a human being. Hell, for all the “seriousness” of the Rasta, those are the only guys I know that seem to understand that an official photo of the Conquering Lion next to a man in a Mickey Mouse suit is inherently funny. You think His Majesty was more of a Pinocchio guy or a Sleeping Beauty guy? Shame that HIM died before the Lion King came out, given that the whole “Simba returns to take his kingdom from the evil fascist lion” was a tad on the nose.
It’s entirely possible that Haile Selassie’s love of animals was partially a public relations ploy. HIM was not always cuddly about them. After the most significant of the failed coup attempts against the emperor, His Majesty’s palace lions were euthanized for failing to defend the Elect of God’s throne, and replaced with lions that His Majesty presumably felt were more up to the task. If you believe that one, I’ve got a bridge to sell you, too.
The love for Lulu was genuine, though, immortalized on a headstone at the royal burial plot in Holy Trinity Cathedral. One of my favorite stories about Haile Selassie’s performative Ethiopian dignity involved Lulu having implicit permission to urinate at the feet of diplomats. Allegedly, those that complained were informed they were no longer to be granted an audience with the Conquering Lion. Don’t offend Lulu, Ferenji. Lulu is a member of the House of Solomon and you are not.
None of this stuff really matters, I guess. It was fun having a dumb bulldog around who loved me so that I could stay grounded; could remember that on the topic of Ethiopia, I started this process pragmatically as dumb as Cheese. We knew the same number of Amharic words, and had an equal absence of understanding of Tewahedo culture. Now Cheese has died and I know more about Tigre-Amhara nationalism and Ethiopian Cold War history than I can fit in a single book. My education on Ge’ez is coming along slowly but surely. I won’t be able to practice it with the best writing assistant I’ve ever had anymore, though.
Hopefully it all hasn’t just been a big waste of time. That’s what we’re all scared of, right? That nobody is ever going to care about what we did on this Earth. Haile Selassie and Lulu don’t have that problem. Maybe that’s why HIM remains so immaculate in death. Maybe rationalists simply can’t understand this stuff because the magic isn’t in the day to day rationale.
I am stuck rationalizing a house without the constant soundtrack of a wheezing street dog; a fire breathing dragon while I studied the land of St. George. Life is less chaotic now without that noise. I’m not sure if I like that yet.
Sorry about Cheese. This is also a pretty clear-eyed blurb of the upcoming book and the process of making it.
I'm sorry for your loss.