Princess Tsehai Haile Selassie

Tsehai Haile Selassie was born on the thirteenth of October 1919 at Addis Ababa, the second daughter of Ras Tafari Makonnen — the future Emperor Haile Selassie I — and Woizero Menen Asfaw (placed in this archive), the future Empress Menen. She was raised at the imperial palace at Addis Ababa.

She received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the Solomonic princesses at the imperial palace school at Addis Ababa — and was instructed in French and English under the French and Swiss tutors brought by her father for the children of the imperial house.

She was educated from 1929 at the Empress Menen School at Addis Ababa — the school founded by her mother — under the Egyptian and Syrian Christian instructors of the period.

She followed her father into exile at Bath, England in May 1936 at the Italian invasion of Ethiopia — and resided at Fairfield House in Bath through the early years of the exile.

She enrolled in 1937 at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children at London in the principal English-speaking nursing training programme of the period — and completed the principal three-year nursing diploma in 1940. She was the first member of the Ethiopian imperial house to complete a European-grade professional nursing qualification.

She served the wards of the Great Ormond Street Hospital across the German Blitz of London of 1940 and 1941 — and at Guy's Hospital London as a surgical theatre nurse across the same period.

She returned with the imperial party to Ethiopia at the restoration of the Ethiopian Empire in May 1941 — and served the principal field hospitals at Addis Ababa across the late summer and autumn of 1941.

She was married in April 1942 to Brigadier-General Abiye Abebe of the Imperial Bodyguard at Addis Ababa.

She died at Lekemt in the Wollega province on the seventeenth of August 1942 of complications of childbirth, at twenty-two.

She is honored here as the first nurse of the Ethiopian imperial house.