Haile Selassie

The man the world would know as Haile Selassie was born Tafari Makonnen on July 23, 1892, in the village of Ejersa Goro in the Harar highlands of the Ethiopian Empire ^[1]. His father, Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael, was governor of Harar province and a trusted cousin and general of Emperor Menelik II, the ruler who had defeated an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Through his father, Tafari claimed descent from the Solomonic dynasty, the royal line that Ethiopian tradition traces to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ^[2].

Tafari's mother, Yeshimebet Ali, died before his second birthday, and his father died in 1906, leaving the teenager to make his way at the imperial court in Addis Ababa. He received an unusual education for an Ethiopian noble of his generation: alongside instruction in the Ethiopian Orthodox faith and the classical Ge'ez language, he studied French with Catholic missionaries in Harar ^[1]. That exposure to European languages and ideas shaped his later conviction that Ethiopia had to modernize to survive.

His abilities were noticed early. Menelik II made him a titled governor while he was still a boy, and by 1910 he held the governorship of Harar, the province his father had ruled ^[3]. There he began experimenting with the administrative reforms, salaried officials and regularized taxation among them, that he would later attempt on a national scale.

Menelik II's death set off years of instability. His grandson and designated heir, Lij Iyasu, alienated the Ethiopian Orthodox establishment and much of the nobility, in part through perceived sympathy for Islam and for the Central Powers during the First World War. In 1916 a coalition of nobles and churchmen deposed Iyasu, crowned Menelik's daughter Zewditu as empress, and named Tafari Makonnen heir to the throne and regent with the rank of Ras ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Haile Selassie before his coronation finds the answer in this period: Ras Tafari, the young regent who steadily accumulated real power while an empress reigned.

As regent, Tafari pushed Ethiopia outward. He secured the country's admission to the League of Nations in 1923, arguing that membership would protect Ethiopian sovereignty from colonial powers, and in 1924 he toured Europe and the Middle East, the first Ethiopian ruler to travel abroad in modern times ^[3]. At home he founded a modern printing press, expanded secular schooling, and worked to abolish the slave trade, a condition of League membership ^[1].

His rise was not unopposed. Conservative provincial nobles resisted centralization, and in 1928 a confrontation with the empress's court ended with Tafari being crowned Negus, or king. When Zewditu died in April 1930, he took the imperial throne. On November 2, 1930, he was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, taking the regnal name Haile Selassie I, meaning Power of the Trinity, in a ceremony attended by royalty and diplomats from across Europe ^[2]. The following year he granted Ethiopia its first written constitution, which created a parliament while concentrating ultimate authority in the crown ^[4].

The defining crisis of Haile Selassie's reign began in October 1935, when Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia from its colonies in Eritrea and Somaliland. Italian forces used aircraft, modern artillery, and poison gas against an Ethiopian army equipped largely with rifles ^[5]. The emperor took personal command in the north, but by May 1936 Addis Ababa had fallen and he left the country, sailing into exile as Italy proclaimed Ethiopia part of Italian East Africa.

On June 30, 1936, Haile Selassie appeared before the League of Nations in Geneva. Speaking in Amharic over the jeers of Italian journalists, he described the gas attacks on his soldiers and civilians and warned the assembled delegates that if the League abandoned Ethiopia, collective security itself would collapse ^[5]. The speech failed to move the powers, which soon lifted sanctions against Italy, but it made him a global figure. Time magazine had already named him its Man of the Year for 1935 ^[6].

He spent most of his exile in Bath, England, at a house called Fairfield, living in reduced circumstances while lobbying for his country's cause ^[3]. The Second World War changed his fortunes. After Italy entered the war in 1940, British and Commonwealth forces, fighting alongside Ethiopian patriot resistance fighters known as arbegnoch, drove the Italians out. Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941, five years to the day after Italian troops had occupied it ^[1].

Any account of Haile Selassie achievements has to begin with restoration and reform. Back on his throne, he moved to rebuild the state on more modern lines. A revised constitution in 1955 introduced an elected chamber of deputies, though political parties remained banned and ministers answered to the emperor alone ^[4]. He expanded secular education, founding what became Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa in 1950, created a national bank and a national airline, and built up a professional army and civil service ^[3].

His most durable diplomatic accomplishment came in African affairs. As colonies across the continent won independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Haile Selassie positioned Ethiopia, never fully colonized, as a natural convener. In May 1963 leaders of thirty two independent African states met in Addis Ababa and founded the Organisation of African Unity, the forerunner of today's African Union, with its permanent headquarters in the Ethiopian capital ^[7]. He also committed Ethiopian troops to United Nations operations, including the Korean War, where the Kagnew Battalions fought under UN command ^[3].

In 1952 the United Nations federated the former Italian colony of Eritrea with Ethiopia. A decade later Haile Selassie dissolved the federation and annexed Eritrea as a province, a decision that ignited a separatist war lasting three decades ^[5]. The episode illustrates the double edge of his statecraft: skilled at winning international standing, he was far less willing to share power at home.

In 1911 Tafari Makonnen married Menen Asfaw, a noblewoman from Wollo province. The marriage endured for over half a century, until Empress Menen's death in 1962, and produced six children ^[2]. Their eldest son, Asfaw Wossen, was designated crown prince, though father and son had a distant relationship, strained further by the crown prince's ambiguous role in a failed 1960 coup attempt staged by the Imperial Bodyguard while the emperor was abroad ^[3].

Haile Selassie was a devout member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and worked to free it from the centuries-old authority of the Coptic patriarch in Alexandria; in 1959 the Ethiopian church gained its own patriarch ^[1]. Slight in stature and formal in bearing, he cultivated an elaborate court ritual and kept pet lions at the palace, emblems of the imperial title Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

One aspect of his personal story unfolded entirely without his design. In Jamaica during the 1930s, followers of what became the Rastafari movement, named for Ras Tafari, came to regard him as a divine figure and the fulfilment of prophecies popularized by Marcus Garvey ^[8]. Haile Selassie, an Orthodox Christian, never claimed divinity. When he visited Jamaica in April 1966, enormous crowds engulfed the airport, an event Rastafarians still commemorate as Grounation Day ^[8].

The final decade of the reign exposed how little the emperor's modernization had changed rural Ethiopia. Land remained concentrated in the hands of the nobility and the church, students in Addis Ababa demonstrated under the slogan of land to the tiller, and the war in Eritrea drained the treasury ^[4]. The aging emperor, increasingly absorbed in foreign travel and ceremony, resisted calls for genuine constitutional limits on his power.

Catastrophe supplied the spark. A famine in Wollo province in 1972 and 1973 killed tens of thousands of people while the imperial government minimized the disaster; a British television documentary by Jonathan Dimbleby contrasted starving peasants with palace banquets and badly damaged the emperor's standing at home and abroad ^[5]. Rising fuel prices, army mutinies over pay, and strikes followed through early 1974.

A committee of junior officers known as the Derg dismantled the imperial government piece by piece during 1974, arresting ministers and aristocrats. On September 12, 1974, soldiers deposed the eighty two year old emperor and drove him from his palace in a Volkswagen. He was held under house arrest in Addis Ababa and died on August 27, 1975. The military government announced that he had died of natural causes following surgery, but many historians and Ethiopian investigators concluded he was killed on the orders of the Derg; his remains were found buried beneath a palace latrine and were reburied in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa in 2000 ^[9].

Judgments of Haile Selassie divide sharply. In much of Africa and its diaspora he is remembered as a symbol of black sovereignty and dignity: the emperor whose country humiliated a European power at Adwa a generation before him, who faced down Mussolini at Geneva, and who gave the continent's unity project its home in Addis Ababa ^[7]. In 2019 the African Union unveiled a statue of him at its headquarters in recognition of that role. Within Ethiopia, memories are more conflicted, weighing his schools, institutions, and diplomacy against famine, the Eritrean war, and an autocracy that ended in revolution and military dictatorship ^[4].

His cultural afterlife is unlike that of any other twentieth century head of state. For Rastafarians, His Imperial Majesty remains God incarnate, and reggae music carried his name, his titles, and even his 1963 address to the United Nations, adapted by Bob Marley in the song War, to audiences worldwide ^[8]. Basic Haile Selassie facts, from his birth at Ejersa Goro in 1892 to his death in captivity in 1975, are now studied as the frame of modern Ethiopian history.

For readers of any Haile Selassie biography, the durable image is the one from June 1936: a small, composed man addressing an indifferent world body and telling it, in effect, that its choice was collective security or international lawlessness. Within a few years the powers that had shrugged were at war, and the warning had become prophecy ^[5].