August 27 - Haile Selassie I dies

On August 27, 1975 Haile Selassie I (1892-1975), the last Emperor (Negus Negest) Ethiopias died in Addis Ababa.

A year before his death, he had been deposed by a Marxist military coup, and many of his followers, of which more later, have claimed that he hadn�t died from prostate problems, but that he was murdered by the ruling junta.
With his death and disposal, the reign of a dynasty came to an end, that claimed to be able to look back on a largely uninterrupted history of three thousand years, and even if the view that the Ethiopian Royal house had its roots in the sixth century AD is far more realistic, it is nevertheless a remarkable story.

Haile Selassie�s family claimed it�s descent from a liaison between Solomon, the King of the Hebrews, and the Queen of Sheba, the mysterious ruler of an even more mysterious African nation, believed to have been located in Ethiopia or Yemen; and according to legend, their son Menelik I was the founder of the Ethiopian Empire.
Are the beginnings of the Empire shrouded in myths, the rise of the Axumite Kingdom is far better documented. From the sixth century AD onwards, the rulers of Axum appear in the history of the East, briefly stretching their Kingdom across the Red Sea into Yemen, and establishing trade and cultural contacts with countries as far as India and the Byzantine Empire. During this time the country was Christianised, by monks coming from Egypt, and after the split of the Egyptian Church from the Christian mainstream, the Ethiopian Church remained a part of the Monophysite Coptic Church.
Miraculously, the Kingdom of Axum survived through the ages and all the challenges it encountered, the advance of Islam in Northern Africa, and the encroachment of European Colonial powers onto the continent.
When Haile Selassie came to power in 1930, he began to rule over a country that as the only one on the African continent had remained Christian and had not been colonized by Europe, although first the Portuguese and later in the 19th century the Italians had tried.



The late Haile Selassie I

In 1935, the Italians came again, pursuing Mussolini�s dream of a resurrection of an Italian/Roman Empire, and quickly overrun the country. Haile Selassie was forced into British exile, but returned in1940, after the Ethiopians with the help of the British had defeated the fascist invaders.
The far greater challenge for the Negus was the modernization of Ethiopia that until the mid twenty century had remained medieval in its political and economic structures. Haile Selassie introduced a number of reforms, a constitution that allowed for a modest version of a constitutional monarchy, he founded the first university in Addis Ababa, but was not able to improve the economic situation of his entirely agricultural country. The country was plagued by draughts and famines then as it is now.
It was thus no surprise that during the 60s and 70s, his subjects began to have doubts about their Emperor, and a couple of revolts and coup d�etats attempted to topple him.
Haile Selassie, becoming increasingly unpopular, held on to power till 1974, but on September 12 1974, the �Derg� ( not to be confused with � the Borg�) , a committee of leading militaries, took power in an unbloody coup. Haile Selassie was arrested and put under house arrest in his palace in Addis Ababa, where he died a year later.

30 years after his death, Haile Selassie, would have become a largely forgotten footnote in African history, if it hadn�t been for one of the freak accidents that makes history so fascinating and entertaining.
In the 30s a movement amongst the black population of North-America and the Caribbean came to life, that demanded a return to the cultural African roots of the former slaves, and indeed a return to their African homelands. For mysterious reasons, Ethiopia was identified as this homeland, and after the �Back to Africa� movement evolved into a religious one, a mixture of Jewish and Christian beliefs, Emperor Haile Selassie became its Messiah. Rastafarianism, as it became known, would have remained relatively obscure, if the popular music that came out of Jamaica in the 60s hadn�t been inspired by it, and after Bob Morley�s Reggae conquered North-America and Europe in the 70s, Haile Selassie became a figure in pop music.

The Emperor had only seen the beginnings of his elevation to the Messiah by the Rastafarians, and being rather mystified by it, had kept his distance to the movement and it would be interesting to find out what he would make of the ironic coincidence, that he is not so much remembered now as the last Ethiopian Emperor but as the subject of countless Reggae records.



The Rastafarian Messiah



What else happened on this day?

479 BC In the Battle of Plataea, Persian forces led by Mardonius are routed by Pausanias, the Spartan commander of the Greek army. Along the with the Greek victory on the same day in the Battle of Mycale, the Persian invasion of Greece ended.

1813 French troops, commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, defeat the Austrian Army at the Battle of Dresden.

1896 The shortest war in world history (9:02 to 9:40) between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar took place.


Full list:

Wikipedia

Edited by Komnenos