Haile Selassie I: The Last Emperor of Africa
On 12 May 1936 a small, bearded man stood before the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva and accused Italy of dropping chemical weapons on military and civilian targets alike. He spoke Amharic. He was fluent in French and could have used it; the choice of his own language was the point. His country had already fallen, his army was destroyed, and the body he was addressing would do nothing. The speech is remembered anyway, because it was the first time an African sovereign put the conscience of Europe on trial in Europe's own building.
Tafari Makonnen
He was born Lij Tafari Makonnen on 23 July 1892 at Ejersa Goro in Hararghe province, son of Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael and Woizero Yeshimebet Ali, whose ancestry was Oromo and Silte. His education in Harar came from two unusual teachers: Abba Samuel Wolde Kahin, an Ethiopian Capuchin friar, and Dr Vitalien, a surgeon from Guadeloupe.
He was made Dejazmatch of Gara Mulatta at thirteen, in November 1905. After the deposition of Lij Iyasu he was proclaimed Crown Prince and Regent Plenipotentiary on 27 September 1916, under Empress Zewditu, and crowned Le'ul-Ras the following February. For fourteen years he governed in another monarch's name, which is a useful apprenticeship in patience.
Joining the World
In 1923 he secured Ethiopia's admission to the League of Nations, promising to eradicate slavery in exchange — a promise that remained substantially unkept, with an estimated two million slaves still in the country in the early 1930s. In 1924 he toured Europe and the Levant, from Jerusalem and Alexandria to Paris, London, Stockholm and Geneva, distributing lions to heads of state along the way.
Zewditu died in 1930. He was crowned Negusa Nagast, King of Kings, on 2 November, taking the regnal name Haile Selassie I in a ceremony that drew royalty from across the world and cost over three million dollars. On 16 July 1931 he gave Ethiopia its first written constitution, establishing a bicameral legislature — and locating sovereign power firmly in the imperial house.
Invasion and Exile
The Welwel incident of December 1934 gave Mussolini his pretext. Italy invaded in October 1935. Ethiopian forces mounted a Christmas offensive and were then destroyed at Tembien, Amba Aradam, Shire and finally Maychew on 31 March 1936, under aerial bombardment and poison gas. Haile Selassie left the country on 2 May for French Somaliland and then Jerusalem, and after Geneva settled in England, largely at Fairfield House in Bath, where he wrote a 90,000-word autobiography.
He crossed back into Ethiopia from Sudan on 18 January 1941, coordinating with the British-led Gideon Force, and re-entered Addis Ababa on 5 May — five years to the day since the Italians had marched in. His first instruction to his people was not to answer Italian atrocities in kind.
The Modernising Autocrat
He confirmed the legal abolition of slavery on 27 August 1942, with capital punishment for slave trading. In 1955, at his Silver Jubilee, a revised constitution made the lower house elective while leaving imperial authority intact. In 1959 he obtained autocephaly for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, its Abuna elevated to Patriarch-Catholicos.
Abroad his standing kept rising. He was the only African head of state at John F. Kennedy's funeral in November 1963. That same year he presided over the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa and became its first chairman, serving again from 1966 to 1967. He helped broker the Bamako Accords with Mali's Modibo Keïta, ending the Morocco–Algeria border war, and in 1964 floated the idea of a United States of Africa.
At home the ground was shifting. On 13 December 1960, while he was in Brazil, the imperial guard proclaimed his son Asfa Wossen emperor; regular forces crushed the coup, but the episode marked the moment Ethiopians began openly questioning the right of a king to rule without consent. Land reform stalled against the nobility and the clergy. Progressive taxation schemes in 1942 and 1966 failed for the same reason. The country stayed, in the phrase historians use, semi-feudal, with the tax burden landing on peasants.
The Fall
Between 1972 and 1974 famine killed somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 people, mainly in Wollo and parts of Tigray. Accounts differ on how much the Emperor knew; what is certain is that when foreign television showed it, the government's credibility collapsed. February 1974 brought inflation riots that left five dead, then a military mutiny beginning in Asmara; Prime Minister Aklilu Habte-Wold resigned on 27 February.
The Derg deposed him on 12 September 1974. He was killed at the Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa on 27 August 1975 — a fact concealed until 1994, the stated cause strangulation. He was finally buried at Holy Trinity Cathedral on 5 November 2000.
Why Haile Is Called a Genius
The word is not used of him in these sources, and the honest description of his gift is diplomatic rather than intellectual. What he possessed, to an unusual degree, was the ability to read international structures and place a weak state advantageously inside them, years before the payoff.
The 1923 League membership is the clearest case. Ethiopia gained nothing immediate; it accepted an obligation on slavery it had no intention of meeting quickly. But membership converted Ethiopian sovereignty from a local fact into an international one, and thirteen years later that is what allowed him to stand at Geneva and force the great powers to record their own failure. The military campaign was lost; the argument was won, and it echoed through decolonisation. The same instinct built the OAU with its headquarters in his capital, making Addis Ababa the diplomatic centre of a continent he no longer had the power to lead.
The counter-case is heavy and should not be softened. Human Rights Watch has described his rule as autocratic and illiberal; his later years saw poor prison conditions and the torture of political dissidents. His constitutions modernised the form of government while preserving his own power. He crushed the Harari movement after the 1948 rebellion; the Oromo language was reportedly excluded from education and administration; Amhara settlers were moved into the south. Land reform, the one change Ethiopia most needed, never came, and famine killed tens of thousands while the palace looked away. Much of his global mystique rests on the Rastafari movement's belief in his divinity — a belief he never accepted, remaining an Orthodox Christian to the end.
Legacy
He was the last emperor of a dynasty that claimed descent from Solomon, and the first African leader whose reputation was made in the international arena rather than the national one. Ethiopia's uncolonised status, defended at Geneva and restored in 1941, became a symbolic anchor for Black nationalist movements from Kingston to Accra. The Organisation of African Unity he convened in 1963 was the direct ancestor of today's African Union, still headquartered in the city where he built it. And the same man is, simultaneously, the emperor whose refusal to reform the land produced the revolution that killed him — both facts belong in the same sentence.
Achievements
- chairperson of the Organisation of African Unity (1963–1964)
- chairperson of the Organisation of African Unity (1966–1967)
- Emperor of Ethiopia (1930–1974)
- Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia
- Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
- Order of the White Eagle
- Order of the White Rose of Finland
- Order of Suvorov, 1st class — 1959
