Haile Selassie
Haile Selassie was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, the last of a dynasty claiming descent from Solomon and Sheba, and became an international symbol of resistance to fascism. Born Tafari Makonnen in 1892 to a cousin and confidant of Emperor Menelik II, he was made a provincial governor at seventeen and became regent and heir in 1916. He modernised deliberately: he abolished the slave trade and moved against slavery itself, brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations in 1923, sent students abroad, founded schools and a modern army, and granted the country's first written constitution in 1931, which also entrenched his own authority. Italy invaded in October 1935 using aircraft and mustard gas against a largely unmechanised army. Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations in Geneva in June 1936 in Amharic, warning that what had been done to Ethiopia would be done to others and asking what reply he should take back to his people. The League did nothing, and its failure is generally dated from that speech. He spent five years exiled in Bath, and returned in 1941 with British and Ethiopian forces. After the war he federated Eritrea in 1952 and then annexed it in 1962, beginning a thirty-year war. He was a founder of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, headquartered in Addis Ababa. His rule ossified. Land remained concentrated in the hands of the church and nobility, and the government concealed the Wollo famine of 1973, in which tens of thousands died, while the court lived visibly well. The Derg deposed him in September 1974 and he was killed in August 1975. Rastafari regard him as divine.
- Lived: 1892 CE – 1975 CE
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: head_of_state, emperor
