Haile Selassie

Haile Selassie I (born Tafari Makonnen, 1892–1975) ruled Ethiopia as regent from 1916 and as emperor from his coronation on 2 November 1930 until his deposition by the Derg military committee on 12 September 1974. His reign spanned the country's invasion by Fascist Italy, its liberation, decolonization across Africa, and the Cold War.

He became an internationally recognized figure after Italy's invasion in October 1935. On 30 June 1936 he addressed the League of Nations in Geneva, warning that the failure to enforce collective security against Italian aggression — including the use of mustard gas — would endanger small states everywhere. The speech is frequently cited as a landmark moment exposing the weakness of interwar collective security. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1935.

After exile in Bath, England, he returned to Addis Ababa in May 1941 following the British-led East African Campaign. Postwar, he positioned Ethiopia as a hub of African diplomacy: Addis Ababa became the seat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (1958) and of the Organisation of African Unity, founded on 25 May 1963 at a summit he hosted. He also contributed Ethiopian troops to the UN Command in Korea (the Kagnew Battalion) and to ONUC in the Congo.

Domestically, his record is contested. He promulgated revised constitutions in 1931 and 1955, abolished slavery, and expanded education, but maintained an autocratic system. Ethiopia federated with Eritrea in 1952 under UN General Assembly Resolution 390(V), then annexed it in 1962, helping trigger a 30-year war. The 1973 Wollo famine, exposed in Jonathan Dimbleby's documentary The Unknown Famine, accelerated unrest that culminated in the 1974 revolution. He died in detention on 27 August 1975.

He is also venerated as a messianic figure within the Rastafari movement, which emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s.