Emperor Haile Selassie Deposed: Ethiopia Falls

The last emperor of a dynasty claiming descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was driven from his palace in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. On September 12, 1974, a committee of military officers known as the Derg deposed Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, ending a reign that had lasted more than four decades and extinguishing the oldest continuous monarchy in Africa. Selassie had ruled Ethiopia since 1930, earning global admiration for his dignified 1936 appeal to the League of Nations after Mussolini’s invasion. His image as a modernizer and anticolonial statesman made him a towering figure in African politics and the spiritual messiah of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, which venerated him as the returned Christ. But by the early 1970s, the gap between his international reputation and domestic reality had become unbridgeable. Famine devastated the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray in 1973, killing an estimated 200,000 people. When journalist Jonathan Dimbleby broadcast footage of starving peasants intercut with scenes of the emperor feeding raw meat to his pet lions, public outrage exploded. Students, taxi drivers, and soldiers began striking, and the Derg formed within the military to coordinate demands for reform. The Derg moved methodically through the summer of 1974, arresting ministers and nobles while professing loyalty to the throne. By September, the pretense was dropped. Selassie was confined to the Grand Palace, then removed to a military installation where he would die under mysterious circumstances the following year, likely smothered on orders from Derg leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. Ethiopia plunged into a Marxist military dictatorship, famine, and civil war that would consume the country for nearly two decades. The Rastafari faithful refused to accept their messiah’s mortality, and Selassie’s legacy remains contested between those who remember a reforming monarch and those who recall a feudal autocrat overtaken by history.