Person1892 – 1975

Haile Selassie I

Also called: Tafari Makonnen, Ras Tafari

Last emperor of Ethiopia (1930–1974), who appealed to the League of Nations against the Italian invasion and regained his throne in 1941

Born Tafari Makonnen, he became emperor in 1930 after serving as regent, granting Ethiopia its first written constitution and pursuing modernization. When Italian troops took the capital he went into exile in Britain, returning with British forces in 1941 to reclaim his country. He sent the Kagnew Battalion to fight for South Korea in the Korean War and led the founding of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. But after long autocratic rule and famine in the 1970s he was deposed by a military coup in 1974 and died in captivity the following year.

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1 related event

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1935 – 1936Italian Invasion of Ethiopiamonarch
Mussolini’s Italy invaded and annexed Ethiopia, an independent African state. The League of Nations’ sanctions ended in failure.

People who appear alongside

Benito Mussolini1883 – 1945
Founder of Italian Fascism who became prime minister (1922–1943) after the March on Rome; dictator who invaded Ethiopia and allied with Hitler

Themes this person appears in

The Great Depression and Totalitarianism1919 – 1939
From the Washington Conference to the invasion of Poland — two decades in which the age of international cooperation collapsed in the Depression, fascism, Nazism and Stalinism rose, and the world slid into war again