Haile Selassie — a revered emperor undone by famine and mutiny

Summary

Haile Selassie I, the last emperor of Ethiopia's Solomonic line, was deposed in Addis Ababa on 12 September 1974 by a committee of junior officers and soldiers known as the Derg, and died in palace custody on 27 August 1975 — almost certainly strangled on the orders of the military government, ending a dynasty that traced its claim, by tradition, back through seven centuries to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He had reigned, as regent then emperor, for nearly six decades. He fell not in a single coup but in a slow unravelling — a "creeping" revolution that stripped his authority away piece by piece over eight months before a small car carried him from his own palace.

Crowned in 1930, Haile Selassie had become one of the towering figures of the twentieth century: the modernizer who gave Ethiopia its first written constitution, the exile who stood before the League of Nations in 1936 to indict Fascist Italy's invasion of his country, the founding patron of the Organisation of African Unity, and — without his knowledge or wish — the messianic figure of the Rastafari movement, who took their name from his pre-coronation title, Ras Tafari. Abroad he was an icon of African independence. At home, by the 1970s, he presided over a feudal and impoverished empire that had stopped reforming and an emperor who had grown old and remote.

The collapse began with hunger. A drought and famine in the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray in 1972–74 killed tens of thousands; the government concealed it, and when foreign film of starving Ethiopians was juxtaposed on television with footage of the emperor's lavish court, the regime's moral authority was destroyed. Through 1974 army mutinies, strikes, and student protests spread, and a committee of soldiers — the Derg — methodically arrested ministers, abolished institutions, and isolated the emperor until nothing of his power remained.

What followed was captivity and murder. The 82-year-old emperor was held in a wing of his Grand Palace as the Derg consolidated into a Marxist dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam and began the killings — sixty senior officials shot without trial that November, and, in the years after, the mass terror of the "Red Terror." Haile Selassie died the following August. The official cause was respiratory failure; the truth, set out in a later trial, was that he had been strangled in his bed. His body was hidden under a palace floor and not recovered until 1992, after the Derg itself had fallen.

Timeline

A modernizer who outlived his reforms

Haile Selassie's authority rested on three things: the Solomonic myth that made the emperor a sacred figure descended from Solomon and Sheba, the loyalty of a landed nobility and the Orthodox Church, and his own international prestige. For the first half of his reign each worked in his favor. He centralized a fractious feudal empire, formally abolished slavery, founded schools and a university, built a modern bureaucracy, and made Ethiopia — alone among African states never durably colonized — the symbolic capital of pan-Africanism. His defiance of Mussolini in 1936, when he warned the League of Nations that "it is us today; it will be you tomorrow," gave him a moral standing that long outlasted the failure of that appeal.

But the modernization stalled. The 1931 constitution and its 1955 revision concentrated power in the emperor rather than dispersing it; the promised evolution toward representative government never came. Land remained locked in a quasi-feudal system that left the peasantry — the great majority of Ethiopians — desperately poor while a small aristocracy and the crown held the wealth. The educated class the emperor himself had created grew impatient with an autocracy that would not share power. By the early 1970s Haile Selassie was in his eighties, detached, surrounded by an aging court that managed his isolation. The reformer had become the obstacle to reform.

The famine and the creeping coup

The trigger was hunger, and the regime's response to it. A failure of the rains across the northern highlands brought famine to Wollo and Tigray; estimates of the dead range widely, from tens of thousands to as many as 200,000. The government did not acknowledge it, did not mobilize relief at scale, and tried to keep it from view. When the British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby's documentary footage of the starving was broadcast — and, in a notorious sequence, intercut with images of the emperor feasting and feeding meat to his dogs — the sacred aura of the throne dissolved. A ruler who could not, or would not, feed his people forfeited the legitimacy that the Solomonic myth had lent him.

The fall that followed was not a single decisive blow but a methodical dismantling — what observers came to call the "creeping coup." It began in February 1974 with army mutinies over pay, which spread to the navy and air force and merged with strikes by workers and protests by students demanding land reform and an end to autocracy. The emperor and his ministers conceded — pay rises, a new prime minister, promises of a constitution — but each concession only confirmed the regime's weakness.

In June 1974 a committee of junior officers and enlisted men, drawn from units across the armed forces, formed the Derg (Amharic for "committee"). Behind a façade of loyalty to the crown, it began arresting ministers, generals, and aristocrats on charges of corruption and complicity in the famine, dismantling the institutions of the state around the emperor one by one. By September the throne had been stripped of everything but its occupant. On 12 September 1974 the Derg announced that Haile Selassie was deposed. He was driven from the Grand Palace not in a state carriage but in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle — a deliberate humiliation — and taken into military custody. The Solomonic dynasty, by its own traditional reckoning seven centuries old, ended without a battle fought to save it.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The deposition of Haile Selassie did not bring the freer, fairer Ethiopia that the students and reformers of 1974 had demanded. It brought the Derg, then Mengistu, and seventeen years of war, terror, and a second, far deadlier famine — the catastrophe of 1983–85 that killed hundreds of thousands and prompted the global Live Aid response. The Derg formally abolished the monarchy in March 1975, redistributed land, fought ruinous wars in Eritrea and against Somalia, and presided over the Red Terror. It was itself overthrown in 1991 by the rebel coalition that became the EPRDF; Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he remains, convicted in absentia of genocide.

Haile Selassie's memory is contested in proportion to the size of the figure. To much of Africa and the wider world he remains the dignified exile who warned the League of Nations and the elder statesman of independence; to the Rastafari movement he is a divine figure still. Within Ethiopia he is remembered more ambivalently — as the modernizer who would not finish modernizing, the sacred emperor who let his people starve, and the last of a dynasty that had ruled, by its own account, since the thirteenth century. His reburial in 2000, conducted without state honors, settled neither the argument over the man nor the question of what should have replaced him.

Lessons

References

• Haile Selassie I ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
• Haile Selassie WIKIPEDIA
• 1974 Ethiopian coup d'état WIKIPEDIA
• Excavation of Haile Selassie's remains WIKIPEDIA
• Fifty years after fall of Ethiopia's empire, survivors remember terror of the Derg dictatorship FRANCE 24