Haile Selassie: The Last Emperor of Ethiopia

Alone among all the empires, kingdoms and states of Black Africa, Ethiopia survived with her independence intact. Due largely to the energy and skill of one man: Emperor Haile Selassie.

The year 1974 witnessed something in Ethiopia which would have seemed unthinkable: the gradual stripping away, bit by bit, of the almost unlimited powers which the 82-year-old Emperor Haile Selassie, like his many predecessors, exerted over this mountain Empire of Eastern Africa.

The air of reform and change made it to the land of Ethiopia. A powerful Army, backed by an intellectual elite of youthful students and foreign-educated civil servants, took the opportunity offered by a catastrophic famine and a period of industrial unrest – Ethiopia’s first –  to change the country from something near a medieval feudal State into something else more closely resembling the other nations of Free Black Africa.

It was impossible to guess how successful their reforms would be for Ethiopia remains, in essence, a deeply conservative society whose roots stretch far back to a time when political ideas were very different from what they are today.

The question remained: Could Ethiopia be brought into line with the world of the 1970s simply by transferring power from one man to the bureaucratic hierarchy of a modern democratic State?

In a country where Emperor Haile Selassie was once the supreme authority, the ageing Emperor now seemed more of a ceremonial puppet.

Could the great Ethiopian national identity and genius survive under a form of government wholly different from the autocracy they had known for generations before? 

Other nations have survived great changes. The Ethiopian monarchy of the early 1970s was an interesting fossil, a survival from another age.

To many of his subjects, Haile Selassie, King of Kings, conquering Lion of Judah, seems even today almost semi-divine, his powers almost a force of Nature, his benevolence all-embracing, his person sacrosanct. Pictured here with his good friend, Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of Kenya, Kenyatta ensured that the Emperor was Kenya’s first foreign dignitary invited during the Jamhuri (Independence) Day celebrations in 1964.