Haile Selassie I

On 2 November 1930 Tafari Makonnen was crowned in Addis Ababa as Haile Selassie I, the Power of the Trinity, with a style that reached back into scripture and into the Kebra Nagast: King of Kings of Ethiopia, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The claim of descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba through their son Menelik was written into the Ethiopian constitutions of 1931 and 1955. Newsreel and press coverage carried the ceremony worldwide, and the sight of an independent African monarch crowned in that language, at a moment when nearly all of Africa was under European rule, was itself the message that travelled.

In Jamaica the coverage met a population already prepared to read it. Marcus Garvey's movement had made the redemption of Africa a public expectation, and preachers including Leonard Howell set the coronation beside two texts: the promise in the fifth chapter of Revelation that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed, and the verse in the sixty-eighth psalm that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. From that reading came the conviction that a divine king now reigned in Africa, and the movement named itself after the title he had held before the crown, Ras Tafari.

Rastafari is not one doctrine on this point and never has been. Some houses hold that he is God incarnate, others that he is the returned Christ, others that he is the earthly head of a movement whose divinity language is metaphorical. What is common is that the emperor's own repeated denials, including in a filmed interview in 1967 in which he said he was a man and mortal, are not treated by most adherents as settling the question.

On 21 April 1966 the emperor landed at Kingston to a crowd estimated at a hundred thousand, so dense that he could not leave the aircraft until Mortimer Planno, a respected Rastafari elder, was brought up the steps to speak to the people. The visit is kept as Grounation Day, the movement's major holy day, and it changed Rastafari practically as well as devotionally: he granted land at Shashamane in Ethiopia for settlement by people of African descent in the western hemisphere, and encouraged repatriation to be pursued alongside, rather than before, the liberation of the diaspora where it stood.

His public life outside the movement was a long argument for the sovereignty of small states. When fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 with aircraft and mustard gas, he went in person to the League of Nations at Geneva in June 1936 to ask for the collective security the League had promised, was heckled by Italian journalists, and told the assembly that the same fate awaited others if aggression went unanswered. He spent five years in exile in England and returned in 1941. In 1963 he was among the founders of the Organization of African Unity, and his address to the United Nations that year, arguing that peace is impossible while any doctrine holds one race superior to another, was set almost word for word by Bob Marley as the song War.

His last years were not a triumph. Famine in Wollo in 1973, concealed by the government and then exposed on foreign television, destroyed the regime's standing, and in September 1974 a military committee, the Derg, deposed him. He died in the palace on 27 August 1975. The Derg reported natural causes; his physician and his family did not accept it. His remains were recovered in 1992 and given an imperial burial in 2000.