Rastafarians revere Haile Selassie as divine, though he stayed Ethiopian Orthodox
To followers of Rastafari, which arose in the 1930s, Haile Selassie is the returned Jesus. The man himself remained a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He ruled Ethiopia for over four decades, abolished slavery, helped found the Organisation of African Unity, and died in custody after a military coup.
He was born Tafari Makonnen on 23 July 1892. As a boy he bore the title Lij, marking noble birth, and his name Tafari means one who is respected or feared. At 13 his father made him governor of Gara Mulatta near Harar. In 1916 he became heir to the throne and regent for Empress Zewditu, and the following year was crowned Le'ul-Ras, becoming Ras Tafari, the name Rastafari later adopted. Before his own coronation in 1930 he defeated the army commander Ras Gugsa Welle at the Battle of Anchem. He took his baptismal name, Haile Selassie, as emperor, claiming descent from a dynasty founded in 1270.
He pushed modernisation: a constitution in 1931 and the abolition of slavery in 1942. When Italy invaded in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and won, he went into exile in Britain, later moving to Sudan to coordinate resistance and returning after the Second World War's East African campaign. He took Ethiopia into the United Nations, and in 1963 he presided over the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, forerunner of the African Union, as its first chairman, steering it away from the anti-Western tone of leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah.
His record draws heavy criticism too. He dissolved the UN-created federation with Eritrea and annexed it as a province, fighting efforts at secession. He crushed revolts by the landed aristocracy, while others faulted him for modernising too slowly. Human Rights Watch among others has called his rule autocratic and illiberal; the Harari people were persecuted, and some sources say the Oromo language was effectively excluded from schools and government late in his reign.
Amid popular unrest, the Derg military junta overthrew him in 1974 and, with Soviet backing, ran Ethiopia as a Marxist-Leninist state. Only in 1994 was it publicly revealed that the Derg had assassinated him on 27 August 1975, inside the capital's Jubilee Palace. His remains were reburied at Holy Trinity Cathedral in 2000, and nostalgia for his reign has lately revived.
Source: Haile Selassie
