THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING

LIKE all Ethiopian royalty, curly-bearded Emperor Haile Selassie traces his ancestry back to the match between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. His Semite-Hamite blood lines show in his stern jaw and aquiline nose. But in practical fact, his hold on the Ethiopian throne has been due less to ancestry than to his ability to outplot Ethiopia's best plotters.

He plotted his own way to the throne. Back in 1916, he was only an ambitious young ras (marshal) named Tafari in the eastern province of Harar when he teamed up with a female cousin in a plot that toppled the playboy Emperor Lij Yasu. Ras Tafari pursued the fugitive Lij Yasu for five years, caught him, threw him in prison and kept him bound in golden chains for 14 years until he died in 1935. Though his cousin became the Empress Zauditu, Ras Tafari gradually emerged as the country's strongman. Upon the Empress' death in 1930, he mounted the throne (with typical flamboyance, he had five pet lions chained to the coronation dais). He took unto himself the name of Haile Selassie ("Power of the Trinity") and the titles Elect of God, King of Kings and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

In Exile. Benito Mussolini made Haile Selassie a world figure, known from the League of Nations to Tin Pan Alley. As his barefoot troops fell back before the 1935-36 Italian invasion, the Emperor trekked to Geneva to ask help from the League of Nations. A tiny (he is only 5 ft. 4 in. tall) but imperious figure, Haile Selassie seemed gallant and curiously impressive even in defeat. When the League declined to save his country for him, he settled down in Britain, where he checked his crown in a bank vault. Four years later, as the British army mounted an offensive against the Italians, Haile Selassie flew to Alexandria, changed to his commander in chief's uniform in the men's room at the airport, and soon went on to Addis Ababa with the conquering army.

The Emperor has found the postwar world more baffling. At first he sided with the West, sent crack troops to Korea. Then he caught the neutralist bug, and last year set off on a flurry of state visits--to "our great friend" Tito, to Nasser, to Russia and Czechoslovakia. He brought back a $100 million Soviet loan.

Presenting Face. Though Haile Selassie describes his government as "state socialism," it is in fact still absolute monarchy. To secure even the smallest government post, the applicant must go through the ritual of feet mahswagaht, which means "making one's face apparent." Each morning, the applicant lines up in front of the palace and waits for the Emperor to walk past, in hope of catching the royal eye. Eventually, if lucky, he gets an audience where, with his face pressed to the floor, he blurts out his qualifications and accepts whatever favor the Emperor is in the mood to dispense. The Emperor's powerful ally is the hierarchy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which owns 40% of Ethiopia's land and resists any effort to alter this profitable situation.

Educated Ethiopians, including 400 who have studied abroad, are naturally resentful of feet mahswagaht and other trappings of the past. But the Emperor, still spry at 68, has no intention of rushing into democracy too fast. His apologists point out that already under Haile Selassie's rule, such venerable Ethiopian customs as slavery, the cutting off of a thief's right hand and the Festival of Raw Meat (where dinner is carved from just-slaughtered cattle while the diners wait) have virtually disappeared.

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