Princess Tsehai Haile Selassie

Tsehai Haile Selassie was born on 13 October 1919 in Addis Ababa, the third daughter and fourth child of Ras Tafari Makonnen — the future Emperor Haile Selassie I — and Woizero Menen Asfaw, later Empress. Raised within the Solomonic imperial house, she was schooled with a discipline uncommon for a princess of her rank, and she carried an early seriousness of purpose that would define her short life.

When Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia and forced the imperial family into exile in Britain from 1936 to 1941, the young princess did not retreat into idle royalty. She resolved to become a nurse, and in doing so became the first Ethiopian woman to train in the profession and the first woman of royal blood to labor at a working trade. At London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children she asked no favor, keeping the full fifty-six-hour week alongside her fellow student nurses and earning a year's wage of twenty pounds. She graduated as a state registered children's nurse on 25 August 1939.

With her father restored to the throne in 1941, she returned home and married the officer Lij Abiye Abebe, moving with him to Welega Province where he was appointed governor. She continued her calling in Ethiopian hospitals, carrying the skill she had earned abroad back to her own people, where trained care was scarce.

On 17 August 1942, at Nekemte, Princess Tsehai died of complications in childbirth, not yet twenty-three. In her memory Emperor Haile Selassie founded the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital and nursing school. May the princess who chose the bedside over the throne be honored always — her hands remembered in every life they were trained to heal.