Haile Selassie — a revered emperor undone by famine and mutiny

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.