Haile Selassie

Haile Selassie I was the last emperor of Ethiopia, ruling as regent from 1916 and as emperor from 1930 until he was overthrown in 1974. He became a world figure when he appealed to the League of Nations against Fascist Italy's invasion of his country in 1936, returned from exile in 1941, and later helped found the Organisation of African Unity. At home he centralised power in the throne and modernised slowly, while poverty, famine and repression fed the revolution that destroyed the monarchy. In the Rastafari movement he is revered as a divine figure.

He was born Tafari Makonnen on 23 July 1892 at Ejersa Goro, near Harar in eastern Ethiopia. His father, Ras Makonnen, was governor of Harar, a cousin and leading general of Emperor Menelik II. Tafari was taught by Ethiopian Orthodox clergy and by French-speaking Catholic missionaries, and he was given his first governorship as a boy in his early teens. After his father's death in 1906 he was brought to court in Addis Ababa and given larger provinces, including Sidamo and, in 1910, Harar itself.

Menelik's grandson and heir, Lij Iyasu, who succeeded in 1913, alarmed the Christian nobility with his ties to Muslim leaders and his dealings with the Central Powers during the First World War. In September 1916 a coalition of nobles and the church deposed him. Menelik's daughter Zewditu became empress, and Tafari, now with the title Ras, was named regent and heir.

As regent he steadily gathered power at the expense of the old aristocracy. He secured Ethiopia's admission to the League of Nations in 1923, which required promises to end slavery and the slave trade, and in 1924 made a long tour of Europe and the Middle East, the first by an Ethiopian ruler. He opened schools, a printing press and a hospital and sent students abroad. In 1928 he was crowned negus, or king, and after Zewditu died in April 1930 he was crowned emperor on 2 November 1930, taking the name Haile Selassie, "Power of the Trinity".

In 1931 he gave Ethiopia its first written constitution, which created a parliament but kept almost all power with the emperor. His centralising reforms were cut short by Italy. Benito Mussolini wanted an empire and revenge for Italy's defeat at Adwa in 1896, and after a border clash at Walwal in December 1934, Italian forces invaded from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland on 3 October 1935.

The Ethiopian armies were brave but poorly equipped against aircraft, tanks and artillery, and the Italians used mustard gas on soldiers and civilians in breach of the Geneva Protocol. The emperor's own army was defeated at Maychew at the end of March 1936. On 2 May he left the country, and three days later Italian troops entered the capital. On 30 June 1936 he addressed the League of Nations in Geneva, warning that collective security would collapse if aggression went unpunished. The League had imposed only limited sanctions and soon dropped them. The speech made him a hero to opponents of Fascism and to many Africans and people of African descent, including in Kenya, whose future leader Jomo Kenyatta campaigned for Ethiopia in London.

He spent the next five years in exile, mostly at Fairfield House in Bath, England. Italian rule in Ethiopia was harsh; after an attempt on the life of the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani in February 1937, Italian forces killed thousands of people in Addis Ababa in three days. Ethiopian resistance fighters, the Arbegnoch, kept fighting in the countryside.

When Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940, Britain recognised Haile Selassie as an ally. In January 1941 he crossed into Ethiopia from Sudan with British and Ethiopian forces, and on 5 May 1941, five years to the day after the Italians had taken it, he re-entered Addis Ababa. In 1942 he confirmed the abolition of slavery with severe penalties for slave trading.

He used the postwar years to rebuild central authority and to end British influence over his government. Revolts were put down firmly, including the Woyane rising in Tigray in 1943, which was crushed with the help of British aircraft. Ethiopia sent troops to fight under the United Nations in Korea. In 1952 the former Italian colony of Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia under a UN decision; the emperor gradually removed its autonomy, and in 1962 it was annexed as a province, provoking a separatist war that lasted thirty years (see History of Eritrea). A revised constitution in 1955 introduced an elected lower house but left the emperor's power intact.

Haile Selassie was one of the most recognised heads of state in the world, travelling widely and receiving visitors from both sides of the Cold War. He offered scholarships to students from colonised countries and supported independence movements during the decolonisation of Africa. In May 1963 he hosted the conference in Addis Ababa that founded the Organisation of African Unity, which made its headquarters there, as its successor, the African Union, still does. He worked alongside leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, though he favoured a looser association of states than Nkrumah's vision of a united continent, and he mediated in disputes between African countries.

In Jamaica in the 1930s, followers of the new Rastafari movement came to see his coronation as the fulfilment of prophecy and to regard him as God incarnate or the returned messiah. He was a devout member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and never claimed divinity, but he received Rastafari delegations and was welcomed by huge crowds on a visit to Jamaica in 1966. He granted land at Shashamane in southern Ethiopia to people of African descent who had supported Ethiopia in the war, and a Rastafari community still lives there.

At home, modernisation remained narrow. A new educated class, many trained abroad, grew impatient with an absolute monarchy, a landowning aristocracy and widespread poverty. In December 1960, while the emperor was abroad, officers of the imperial guard attempted a coup; it was crushed, but it showed how far discontent had spread. Student protests grew through the 1960s.

The final crisis came with famine in Wollo and Tigray in 1972 to 1974, which killed an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 people or more. Officials concealed it, and when a British television documentary exposed it in 1973, contrasting the hunger with palace life, the emperor's reputation collapsed. Army mutinies, strikes and protests over rising prices followed in early 1974. A committee of junior officers, the Derg, took power step by step and deposed the 82-year-old emperor on 12 September 1974. In November it executed sixty former officials without trial.

Haile Selassie was held prisoner in his palace, and on 27 August 1975 state media announced that he had died of respiratory failure. After the Derg fell in 1991, evidence emerged that he had been killed on its orders, probably strangled or smothered. His remains were found under the palace grounds in 1992, and in November 2000 he was reburied in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa.

Haile Selassie remains a divisive figure. To admirers he was a reformer who defended Ethiopian independence, faced down Fascism before the world and gave Africa a voice in international affairs. To critics he was an autocrat who concentrated power in his own hands, suppressed regional revolts and Eritrean self-rule, and allowed famine to go unaddressed, leaving the country unprepared for the violent Derg regime that followed. For the wider story, see the History of Ethiopia.