Haile Selassie I

Lij Tafari Makonnen was born in Ejersa Goro, Ethiopia, on the twenty-third of July 1892. He was crowned Haile Selassie I — "Power of the Trinity" — Emperor of Ethiopia on the second of November 1930, in a coronation attended by representatives of every major world power. He ruled Ethiopia for forty-three years.

His reign began with reform. He established Ethiopia's first written constitution in 1931, founded its first university, abolished slavery in 1932 (the law took two decades to enforce in practice), and joined the League of Nations as the first African member. He drafted Ethiopia's modern bureaucracy, codified its laws, and built the infrastructure for a centralized modern state from what had been a feudal empire.

The defining episode of his life is the Italian invasion of 1935. When Mussolini's army of two hundred thousand crossed from Eritrea into Ethiopia, Haile Selassie led his outnumbered forces personally and then, when the war was lost, travelled to Geneva to address the League of Nations on the thirtieth of June 1936. The speech is one of the great orations of the twentieth century. He said: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." The League did nothing. Italy occupied Ethiopia for five years. The British liberation of 1941 restored him to the throne.

After 1945 he became the elder statesman of African independence. He hosted the conference at Addis Ababa in 1963 that founded the Organisation of African Unity — the predecessor of the African Union — and chaired its first decade. For the Rastafari movement of Jamaica, founded in the 1930s after Marcus Garvey's prophecy of "a black king crowned in Africa," he was the messiah. He held that role through his life with public restraint and personal courtesy.

He was deposed by the Derg military junta on the twelfth of September 1974, held under house arrest at the Grand Palace, and died there in August 1975 under circumstances the Derg did not adequately explain. His remains were recovered from beneath the palace toilet block in 1992 and reinterred at the Holy Trinity Cathedral.

He is honored here as the emperor in whose person Ethiopia survived two world wars, and the founding statesman of independent Africa.