Ethiopia 1 Ghersh Date? And Comment/Question

The date on these coins is the small characters on the shoulder of the bust. As with American "buffalo" nickels, when the coin is worn, the date can be hard to read.

It doesn't help that for many of the reference sites, and for the Krause books themselves, the pictures of Ethiopian coins are sometimes wrong. They are wrong and misleading in this case. There are two varieties of the 1889 coin: "right leg raised" and "left leg raised". But the pictures in the NGC database both show wrong pictures for both the "right leg raised" and "left leg raised" varieties. The coin shown for "right leg" (KM 13) is actually "left leg", and the coin shown for "left leg" (KM 12) is actually another denomination entirely, not a 1 gersh. The "right leg raised" variety is the scarce one, minted in Addis Ababa rather than Paris (no "A" mintmark), and it looks like this example on zeno.ru.

Your coin has "left leg raised" and the "A" mintmark, so it isn't the scarce one. It will be KM# 12. But you need to look at KM# 13 for the correct picture.