Abstract
For over half a century the man who became known as Haile Selassie I dominated Ethiopian life. He ranks as one of the outstanding world leaders of the twentieth century. He was castigated during the com-munist/Derg era as the incarnation of backwardness and greed, but the new government that came to power in 1991 permitted a re habilitation of his reputation. His remains were dug up from a cellar in the Grand Palace where he had been secretly buried in late August 1975 when Mengistu Haile Mariam had him strangled barely a year after he had been hauled off from his palace in a Volkswagen and imprisoned. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the visitor to Ethiopia sees his photograph everywhere: in shop windows and bars, on automobile bumper stickers, on T-shirts. A political party, Moa Anbasa, advocates restoration of the monarchy but is hampered by the fact that there is no descendant of the last Lion of Judah credible as a contender for power.1
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Notes
A good beginning has been made by Harold Marcus in his Haile Sellassie I, the Formative Years, 1892–1936, University of California Press, 1987. A comprehensive biography was published in France soon after his death: Gontran de Juniac, Le dernier Roi des Rois, Plon, Paris, 1979.
Angelo Del Boca, Il Negus. Vita e Morte dell’Ultimo Re dei Re, Editori Laterza, Rome, 1995.
Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of My Choice, Collins, London, 1987, p. 25.
Haggai Erlich: Ethiopia and the Challenge of Independence, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1986, p. 136.
The episode is recounted in Christine Sandford, Ethiopia under Haile Selassie, J.M. Dent, London, 1946, p. 34.
Major R.E. Cheesman’s Lake Tana and the Blue Nile, Cass, London, 1968
For a detailed study of this kingdom, see Herbert S. Lewis, A Galla Monarchy, Jimma Abba Jifar, Ethiopia, 1830–1932, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1965.
An account of a perilous journey across the Afar lowlands to the Eritrean coast at the end of the 1920s, L.M. Nesbitt’s Desert and Forest, Jonathan Cape, London, 1934
One of the most significant products of early Swedish-mission education was a Tigrayan born near Adwa in 1886, Gebrehiwot Baykedagn, who became an important theorist of modernization. He went to Europe to continue his education and returned from Germany with a medical mission that came to treat the declining Menelik. He had been exiled by Empress Taitu, but now joined Ras Tafari’s supporters. Though he died in 1917, Ras Tafari encouraged collection of his writings which were one of the first publications of the Berhanena Selam press in 1924. Reissued again in Amharic in Ethiopia in 1960, they have been translated into English by Tenkir Bonger (ed.) as The State and Economy of Early 20th Century Ethiopia, Karnak House, London, 1995.
In addition to Angelo Del Boca’s, there are many other accounts of the Italo Ethiopian War, both journalistic and scholarly, e.g. Ladislas Farago, Abyssinia on the Eve, Putnam, London, 1935
G.L. Steer, Caesar in Abyssinia, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1936
A.J. Barker, The Civilizing Mission, Dial Press, New York, 1968
James Dugan and Lawrence Lafore, Days of Emperor and Clown, Doubleday, New York, 1973
Thomas M. Coffey, Lion by the Tail, Viking Press, New York, 1974
Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience, Zed Books, London, 1985, pp. 234–5.
Haile Mariam Larebo, The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia, 1935–41, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994.
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© 2000 Paul B. Henze
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Henze, P.B. (2000). The Rise of Haile Selassie. In: Layers of Time. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11786-1_7
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