Zewditu
Zewditu was empress of Ethiopia from 1916 until her death in April 1930, the daughter of Menelik whom the nobles proclaimed when they deposed her nephew Iyasu, the first woman to reign in her own right over the country since the queen of Sheba, if one counts her. She was the only woman head of state in the world in the 1920s. The fourteen years were a reign in which she was the throne and Ras Tafari, the regent and heir the same proclamation gave her, was the government. She was crowned on 11 February 1917, the first Ethiopian sovereign crowned since Menelik. The arrangement was written into the proclamation. She would reign, he would rule, and she would not remarry. Her husband, Ras Gugsa Welle, was sent to govern Begemder. That was where the reign's end came from. She was pious, spent her days in prayer and fasting and her nights with her priests. She gave the church what it asked. She disliked what Tafari did, the League of Nations joined in 1923, the slave trade abolished on paper, the European tour of 1924, the schools, the printing press, the aeroplanes, and the young men he sent abroad. The court divided into her party of the old nobles and his of the new, with the minister of war Habte Giyorgis between them until he died in 1926. After that Tafari had the army. She was made to crown him negus, king, in October 1928 after a confrontation at the palace in which her party lost. In March 1930 her husband Gugsa Welle raised Begemder against Tafari and was killed at the battle of Anchem on 31 March, the first battle in the country in which aeroplanes were used. She died two days later, on 2 April, of what the court said was typhoid and diabetes and the country said was grief or something else. Tafari was proclaimed emperor as Haile Selassie the same day. She was born at Harar, and was married at ten and four times in all. She had no children who lived. The reign is remembered, when it is, as the one in which everything that came after was prepared behind her back.
- Lived: 1876 CE – 1930 CE
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: empress, monarch
