Empress Menen Asfaw

Menen Asfaw was born on the third of April 1891 at Egua, in the Ambassel district of the Wollo province, the daughter of Jantirar Asfaw — a nobleman of the Wollo Christian aristocracy — and Woizero Sehin Mikael, a granddaughter of Negus Mikael of Wollo. She was raised at the Wollo court of her grandfather Negus Mikael.

She received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the Solomonic noblewomen at the Wollo court — reading the Ge'ez Psalter and the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy under the instruction of the Wollo monastic clergy.

She was married three times before her marriage to Ras Tafari Makonnen in 1911 — by the rite of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the imperial laws of succession. She was twenty and Tafari was nineteen.

She was crowned Empress consort of Ethiopia on the third of November 1930 at the Cathedral of Saint George at Addis Ababa — at the imperial coronation of her husband as Emperor Haile Selassie I — and held the title from that date until her death in 1962.

She founded the Empress Menen School at Addis Ababa in 1931 — the first imperial school for the daughters of the nobility and the daughters of the Black Ethiopian Orthodox Christian aristocracy. The school operated under her personal patronage and curriculum, which included Amharic, French, English, mathematics, history, and the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy.

She followed Haile Selassie into exile at Bath, England in May 1936 at the Italian invasion of Ethiopia — and remained in residence at Fairfield House in Bath through the five years of the Italian occupation.

She returned with the Emperor at the restoration of the Ethiopian Empire in May 1941 — and resumed her imperial residence at the Gennete Leul Palace at Addis Ababa.

She was the principal patron of the Ethiopian Women's Welfare Association from its founding in 1935.

She died at Addis Ababa on the fifteenth of February 1962 of complications of a long illness, at seventy.

She is honored here as the founder of the Empress Menen School.