# Haile Selassie **Tafari Makonnen (23 July 1892 – 27 August 1975)**, regent of Ethiopia from **27 September 1916**, crowned Emperor on **2 November 1930** with the titles *King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God*. He is simultaneously the most internationally famous African head of state of the twentieth century, a competent moderniser, an autocrat who never conceded meaningful power, a religion's living god, and a man who was probably strangled in his own palace and buried under a latrine. ## The world figure **The [[Abyssinia Crisis]].** His address to the [[League of Nations]] Assembly on **30 June 1936** — delivered in Amharic, through jeering from the Italian press gallery — is the founding text of the argument that guarantees to small states are worthless if the guarantors will not enforce them. The League lifted sanctions on Italy four days later. He spent his exile at Fairfield House in Bath and returned to Addis Ababa on **5 May 1941**. **The [[African Union]]'s ancestor.** He brokered between the rival Casablanca and Monrovia blocs to produce the **Organisation of African Unity**, founded in Addis Ababa on **25 May 1963** with 32 signatory states, and became its first chairman. The AU is still headquartered there because of it. ## The domestic record The **1955 Constitution**, promulgated on his Silver Jubilee, made the lower chamber elective while leaving him emergency decree power and the appointment of ministers, senators and judges. His own American adviser complained the Crown Council forced the drafters to stress prerogative; the historian Bahru Zewde called it "a legal charter for the consolidation of absolutism." It did **not** establish universal adult suffrage. The **December 1960 coup attempt** by the Imperial Bodyguard, led by Germame Neway and his brother Brigadier General Mengistu Neway while the Emperor was on a state visit to Brazil, was crushed by the army and air force — but not before the plotters machine-gunned fifteen officials, including the prime minister. At least 300 died. It was the most serious challenge to his rule between 1941 and 1974, and the sign that the modernised class he had created no longer accepted the settlement. **Land was the unreformed thing.** The *gult* tenure imposed on the conquered south by [[Menelik II]] converted cultivators into *gabar* tenants; by 1974, rents in parts of the south reached **three-quarters of the crop**, and tenancy affected about 60% of peasants. Reform bills died in parliament against landed interests, the church prominent among them. The [[Derg]]'s Proclamation 31/1975 — "land to the tiller" — abolished the whole structure in a single stroke, which is a substantial part of why the revolution was initially popular. ## The famine that ended him The **Wollo famine of 1972–75** killed an estimated **40,000–80,000** in 1972–73, with cumulative figures running to 250,000 by 1975; a contemporary Ethiopian Nutrition Institute estimate of 200,000 was later judged over-pessimistic but is the number that circulated. Famine districts were **exporting grain to the cities in 1973**. When famine indicators had appeared in 1965, the Emperor was notified after 320 days of bureaucratic delay. **Jonathan Dimbleby's "The Unknown Famine,"** broadcast by Thames Television on **18 October 1973**, brought it to the world. Inside Ethiopia the footage was recut against film of imperial banquets and used as a political weapon. He was deposed on **12 September 1974**; the monarchy was abolished on 21 March 1975. > [!warning] How he died is testimonially strong and forensically unresolved > The Derg announced death from circulatory failure following a prostate operation. No autopsy was performed. Palace servants testified to suffocation; 2006 court testimony recorded a Derg resolution "that His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie should be strangled because he was head of the feudal system," dating the killing to the night of 26 August 1975. The transitional government nonetheless found no corroborating forensic evidence sufficient to charge, and Mengistu has always denied ordering it. His remains were found on **17 February 1992** beneath a latrine in the palace grounds, buried vertically in concrete, and reburied at Holy Trinity Cathedral on **5 November 2000** — in a public but pointedly **non-state** funeral. See [[Mengistu Haile Mariam]]. ## Why he matters here **A symbol is not obliged to resemble its referent.** To the [[Rastafari]] he was God incarnate; he told a Canadian radio interviewer in 1967 that he was "a man... mortal," and the movement continued. To [[Marcus Garvey]], whose movement had done more than any other to make Ethiopia a Black political symbol, he was by 1937 a ruler who "knows nothing about history and European diplomacy" and had "only considered Negroes as being of no consequence." To the League he was the conscience of collective security. To Ethiopian peasants he was the landlord of last resort. **All four were describing the same man in the same decades**, which is worth holding onto whenever a political symbol is being built out of a living person — a process the vault tracks in a dozen other places. ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Abyssinia Crisis]] · [[Second Italo-Ethiopian War]] · [[Ethiopianism]] · [[Rastafari]] · [[Derg]] · [[Menelik II]] · [[Dictators in World History Hub]]