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THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

HISTORY · ANNIVERSARY

Tikimt 23: The Weight of a Crown

Ninety-six years ago today, a regent named Tafari became Emperor Haile Selassie I. To understand Ethiopia’s twentieth century, its triumphs and its unfinished reckonings, one must understand how he reached that throne and what he did with it.

By Endex

2 November 2026 · Tikimt 23, 2019 E.C.

On Tikimt 23, 1923 in our calendar, 2 November 1930 in the world’s, the bells of St George’s Cathedral in Addis Ababa rang for a coronation the world had been invited to watch. Abuna Qerellos placed the crown on the head of a slight, composed man of thirty-eight. He took the throne name Haile Selassie, “Power of the Trinity”, with the full style of Negusa Nagast, King of Kings, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

He would be the last to wear that crown. Within forty-four years the dynasty that claimed descent from Solomon and Makeda would be swept away by soldiers in a single September morning. Between those two dates lies the most consequential reign in modern Ethiopian history.

This essay is offered for education, not hagiography. It traces the road to that November morning, the institutions he built, the war that nearly erased the state, the diplomacy that made Addis Ababa the capital of Africa, the reforms it attempted, and the revolution that ended it all. Our young readers in particular deserve the whole story, not the poster version favoured by either his admirers or his detractors.

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“A boy from Ejersa Goro, born in the shadow of Adwa”

Tafari Makonnen was born on 23 July 1892 at Ejersa Goro, near Harar. His father was Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael, cousin and closest confidant of Emperor Menelik II. His mother, Weyzero Yeshimebet Ali, died when he was an infant.

The Ethiopia of his childhood had just done something no other African state managed in that era. On 1 March 1896, at Adwa, Menelik’s armies destroyed an Italian invasion force. The Treaty of Addis Ababa that followed recognised Ethiopian independence, and Adwa became a beacon for colonised peoples everywhere.

Ras Makonnen fought at Adwa and then served as Menelik’s diplomat abroad, including at the coronation of Edward VII in London in 1902. He was among the first Ethiopian nobles to see Europe’s railways, schools and ministries up close. He made sure his son learned French and was taught by Catholic missionaries in Harar, alongside the traditional church education every noble child received.

When Ras Makonnen died in 1906, the fourteen-year-old Tafari was brought to Menelik’s court. He was given governorships in Selale, then Sidamo, then in 1910 his father’s own province of Harar. These were his first lessons in administration, taxation and the difficult art of managing powerful men.

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“On the feast of the Cross, a throne changed hands”

Menelik suffered a series of strokes from 1906 onwards and died in December 1913. His chosen heir was his grandson, Lij Iyasu, a young man of energy and real ambition. Iyasu reached out to Muslim and Oromo communities in ways that alarmed the Shewan nobility and the Church.

His courtship of the Ottoman Empire and Germany during the First World War also alarmed the British, French and Italian legations. The accusation that he had abandoned the Orthodox faith, much of it propaganda, gave his enemies their pretext. On 27 September 1916, during Meskel, the nobility and the Church deposed him.

Menelik’s daughter, Zewditu, became Empress, crowned on 11 February 1917. Tafari, then twenty-four, was named Balemulu Silt’an Enderase (regent plenipotentiary) and heir to the throne. Iyasu’s father, Negus Mikael of Wollo, marched on the capital but was defeated at the Battle of Segale on 27 October 1916.

It was an uneasy partnership. Zewditu was devout and conservative, surrounded by the old guard. Tafari was patient, quietly reformist, and increasingly the face of Ethiopia to the outside world. For fourteen years, two centres of authority coexisted in one palace compound.

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“Adwa had won independence, but not security”

Tafari understood that Adwa had won Ethiopia’s independence, but not its security. Surrounded by British, French and Italian colonies, the country needed recognition as a member of the community of nations. His regency was a patient campaign to secure exactly that.

The League of Nations (1923). Ethiopia was admitted on 28 September 1923, one of very few African members. Britain and Italy had objected, citing slavery. The condition of entry was a commitment to end the slave trade.
The slavery question. Edicts in 1923 and 1924 banned the trade and provided for gradual emancipation. Enforcement was uneven, and final abolition would not come until 1942. Still, the regent made the issue a national commitment rather than a foreign accusation.
The European tour (1924). Tafari travelled through Palestine, Egypt, France, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Britain, Greece and other states. He studied schools, hospitals and factories, and he sought, without success, a port on the Red Sea.
Schools and the press. The Tafari Makonnen School opened in 1925. A printing press produced the weekly Berhanena Selam (“Light and Peace”) from 1925, a forum for a new generation of Ethiopian reformist intellectuals.
A crown before the crown (1928). After facing down a palace challenge by Dejazmach Balcha Safo, Tafari was crowned Negus (King) on 7 October 1928, still under the Empress.

The final contest came from Ras Gugsa Welle, governor of Begemder and Zewditu’s estranged husband. He rose in rebellion in 1930 and was killed at the Battle of Anchem on 31 March 1930, where the regent’s forces used aircraft for the first time in Ethiopian warfare. Two days later, on 2 April 1930, Empress Zewditu died. The road to the throne was clear.

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“At dawn on Tikimt 23, the world came to watch”

The coronation was designed as a message to the world: Ethiopia was an ancient Christian monarchy, a sovereign equal, and not a territory awaiting a colonial master. Seven months of preparation transformed the capital. Roads were laid, electric lights strung, buildings refaced and a monument raised.

The guest list was itself diplomacy. Britain sent the Duke of Gloucester, son of King George V. France sent Marshal Franchet d’Espèrey; Italy, the Prince of Udine; the United States, a special envoy. Delegations came from Belgium, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands and others. Journalists followed, among them Evelyn Waugh, whose mocking accounts later fed his novels.

“Ethiopia was an ancient Christian monarchy, a sovereign equal, and not a territory awaiting a colonial master.”

The rite itself followed the ancient Ge’ez liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Through the night the clergy chanted. At dawn, Abuna Qerellos anointed the Emperor and invested him with the regalia: the robe, the sword, the sceptre, the orb, the ring, the twin spears and finally the crown. Empress Menen Asfaw was then crowned beside him, a reminder that the throne was a household as well as an office.

Far away in Jamaica, some heard something else. To certain readers of scripture there, a Black king crowned before the princes of Europe seemed to fulfil prophecy. From that reading grew the Rastafari movement, which still bears his pre-coronation name. Whatever one makes of its theology, it shows how far the image of Tikimt 23 travelled.

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“A strong crown before a strong parliament”

Within nine months the Emperor gave Ethiopia its first written constitution, proclaimed on 16 July 1931. It created a two-chamber parliament, the first in the country’s history. But the senate was appointed by the Emperor, the lower house was chosen by the nobility, and sovereignty remained explicitly in the person of the monarch.

Later critics called this power drawn to the centre. Its defenders answer that a country whose regional lords had nearly torn it apart in 1916 and again in 1930 needed a strong crown before it could afford a strong parliament. Centralisation, in their view, was the precondition of national unity and of survival among colonial neighbours.

The same years saw the foundations of a modern state:

The Bank of Ethiopia (1931) replaced the foreign-owned Bank of Abyssinia and issued a national currency.
Ministries and a salaried bureaucracy began to replace a court run through personal retainers.
A modern army took shape, with foreign military advisers, the Imperial Guard, and the Holeta military school opened in 1934.
Students sent abroad, to Europe, the United States and Lebanon, formed the first cohort of Western-educated Ethiopians. Many would die in the coming war.

The time was short. Mussolini’s Italy had not forgotten Adwa.

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“Abandoned in Ethiopia, abandoned everywhere”

The pretext was a skirmish at the wells of Walwal in the Ogaden on 5 December 1934. Ethiopia took the dispute to the League of Nations, as a member was entitled to do. The League temporised. On 3 October 1935, Italy invaded without a declaration of war.

The League named Italy the aggressor and imposed sanctions, but left out oil, the one measure that might have stopped the war. In December, Britain’s Hoare and France’s Laval even drafted a secret plan to hand Italy much of Ethiopia; public outrage killed it. Meanwhile Italian aircraft sprayed mustard gas on soldiers, civilians, villages and livestock, in open violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

The Emperor led his army in person at Maychew on 31 March 1936 and was defeated. On 2 May he left Addis Ababa by train for Djibouti; three days later Marshal Badoglio’s troops entered the capital. The decision to leave remains debated. Some saw desertion; others saw the only way to keep Ethiopia’s legal existence alive.

On 30 June 1936 he stood before the League Assembly in Geneva, jeered by Italian journalists in the gallery, and spoke for every small nation. His warning, in substance, was that collective security abandoned in Ethiopia would be abandoned everywhere: today it is us, tomorrow it will be you. Within four years Europe was at war, and the speech had become prophecy.

“Collective security abandoned in Ethiopia would be abandoned everywhere.”

He spent the exile largely at Fairfield House in Bath, England, living modestly while his envoys, among them Dr Workneh Martin in London, kept Ethiopia’s case alive. At home the occupation was savage. After an attempt on Viceroy Graziani’s life on Yekatit 12 (19 February 1937), Italian forces and Blackshirts massacred thousands in Addis Ababa. That May, the monks and deacons of Debre Libanos were executed.

Yet the country was never pacified. The Arbegnoch, the patriots, fought on in Shewa, Gojjam, Begemder and beyond, led by figures such as Ras Abebe Aregai, Belay Zeleke and Shewareged Gedle. When Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940, Britain at last became an ally. The Emperor crossed back into Gojjam from Sudan on 20 January 1941 with Gideon Force and the patriots. On 5 May 1941, exactly five years after the Italians took Addis Ababa, he re-entered his capital.

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“The nation the League forsook helped build its successor”

Liberation did not bring full sovereignty at once. Britain treated Ethiopia almost as a protectorate under the 1942 Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement, and the Emperor spent years prising control back. The 1944 agreement restored most of it. The Ogaden and the railway zone took longer.

What followed were the reign’s most celebrated achievements:

Founding member of the United Nations (1945). The country the League abandoned helped build its successor.
Ethiopian Airlines (1945). Founded in December 1945, it flew its first service in 1946 and grew into one of the continent’s great carriers.
Korea (1951–1954). The Kagnew Battalion fought under the UN flag, a practical defence of the collective security he had pleaded for in Geneva. Ethiopian troops later served with the UN in the Congo from 1960.
A national Church (1948–1959). After centuries under Egyptian Coptic metropolitans, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church gained its own bishops, and in 1959 its first patriarch, Abune Basilios.
Higher education. University College of Addis Ababa opened in 1950 and became Haile Selassie I University in 1961, producing Ethiopia’s first modern professional class.
The revised Constitution (1955). Proclaimed for the silver jubilee, it added a chapter of rights and an elected Chamber of Deputies, first chosen in 1957. Modern penal, civil and commercial codes followed between 1957 and 1965.
Eritrea (1952). A UN resolution federated Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952, restoring access to the sea. In 1962 the federation was dissolved and Eritrea annexed, a decision whose consequences still bleed today.

The crowning diplomatic act came in May 1963. The UN Economic Commission for Africa had already been seated in Addis Ababa in 1958. On 25 May 1963, thirty-two newly independent African states gathered in Africa Hall and founded the Organisation of African Unity, headquartered in Addis Ababa. The Emperor’s mediation between rival blocs of African states made the agreement possible. Africa Day is still celebrated on that date.

In April 1966 he visited Jamaica and was met by tens of thousands of Rastafari at Kingston airport. The orphan of Ejersa Goro had become one of the most recognised figures on earth.

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“Reform raced against revolution, and revolution won”

The first warning came from inside the palace. In December 1960, while the Emperor was on a state visit to Brazil, the commander of the Imperial Guard, Brigadier-General Mengistu Neway, and his brother Germame seized the capital. The army, the air force, the Church and the people of Addis Ababa rallied to the throne, and the coup collapsed within days. To many Ethiopians that loyalty proved how deeply the crown was rooted; to a restless few, it proved the crown could be challenged.

The questions of the 1960s were real, and the imperial government did not ignore them:

Land. Ethiopian land tenure was ancient and intricate: inherited rist rights in the north, gult privileges held by nobility and Church, and newer tenancies in the south. The government created a Ministry of Land Reform and Administration in 1966, abolished the remaining gult privileges, and in 1967 introduced an agricultural income tax, which provoked an armed revolt in Gojjam in 1968. A tenancy bill to protect southern farmers stalled in a parliament of landholders. Admirers see the foundations of an evolutionary reform; critics see too little, too late.
The students. The university he founded produced Ethiopia’s first modern professional class, and also its most radical critics. From 1965 a vocal minority marched under the slogan Meret le Arashu, “Land to the Tiller”. Many were drawn to imported Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which recast Ethiopia’s distinctive history in categories borrowed from European class struggle. The country would pay dearly for that borrowing.
The periphery. Armed struggle began in Eritrea in 1961 and hardened after the federation ended. A long revolt ran in Bale from 1963 to 1970. Somali irredentism over the Ogaden flared into war in 1964.
The succession. The Emperor was past eighty. Crown Prince Asfa Wossen suffered a severe stroke in 1973, and no settled plan existed for the transition.

Then came Wollo. Famine in 1972–73 cost tens of thousands of lives, and provincial officials minimised its scale; how fully the Emperor himself was informed is still debated. In October 1973 Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary The Unknown Famine brought it to the world. On the eve of the deposition the Derg broadcast it on Ethiopian television intercut with scenes of palace luxury, a calculated piece of propaganda designed to turn reverence into rage.

“They dared not lay hands on a man so many still regarded as the Elect of God until they had first eroded that faith.”

In early 1974 army units mutinied over pay and conditions, and the oil shock brought teachers, taxi drivers and students onto the streets. A committee of junior officers, the Derg, formed in June and dismantled the old order piece by piece in a “creeping coup”. The soldiers moved slowly for a reason: they dared not lay hands on a man so many still regarded as the Elect of God until they had first eroded that faith. On 12 September 1974, the day after Enkutatash, he was deposed and driven from the palace in a Volkswagen.

What followed tested every accusation made against the old order. On 23 November 1974 the Derg executed some sixty former officials without trial. In March 1975 it abolished the monarchy and nationalised all rural land, denying the farmer ownership of the very plot the slogan had promised him. On 27 August 1975 state media announced the Emperor’s death; it is widely believed he was murdered. The Red Terror of 1977–78 killed tens of thousands of young Ethiopians, and the famine of 1984–85 claimed far more lives than Wollo had.

His remains were found in 1992, buried beneath the palace grounds. On 5 November 2000 he was laid to rest in Holy Trinity Cathedral beside Empress Menen, mourned by thousands who still called him Janhoy.

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“Faith, crown and nation, weighed honestly”

For half a century Haile Selassie has mostly been judged through one lens: the Marxist-Leninist narrative of the student movement and the Derg, which taught a generation to see the crown only as “feudal” oppression. That framework was itself an ideology, imported and then imposed by force. Our young readers deserve better than inherited slogans from any side, and an independent reading must hear at least four voices.

To the faithful, he was the Elect of God. For millions of Ethiopians the Emperor was never merely a ruler. In the tradition of the Kebra Nagast and the Church’s coronation rite, the Solomonic king was anointed, the defender of the faith and the father of the nation. People called him Janhoy, bowed as he passed, and read his return from exile as providence. That reverence was not servility: it was the bond that held a vast and diverse realm together, and its violent destruction left a void that ideology and the gun rushed to fill. Rastafari across the world carry a form of that devotion still.

To the constitutionalist, he was the father of Ethiopian law and rights. The 1931 Constitution was the country’s first. The 1955 Constitution added a chapter of rights: equality before the law, freedom of speech, press and assembly within the law, protection of property, and an elected chamber. Modern penal, civil and commercial codes followed between 1957 and 1965. Monarchists argue this was a gradual path toward constitutional monarchy, of the kind Britain, Sweden and Japan had travelled, which the revolution cut short. Critics reply that political parties were never permitted and that rights on paper were narrower in practice.

To the nationalist, he was the guardian of independence. Geneva in 1936, the return of 1941, the seat at the founding of the UN, the restoration of the sea through Eritrea and the OAU in Addis Ababa: no African leader of his century carried his country’s name further.

To his critics, he left too much unresolved. Land, the succession, the place of Ethiopia’s many nations and the hunger in Wollo were not settled in time, and a system so dependent on one revered person could not outlast his old age.

“Institutions built over centuries should be reformed with care, not torn down in a season.”

An honest verdict weighs all four. It acknowledges that the crown did not reform fast enough to save itself. It also records that the alternative imposed in 1974 in the name of the peasant took the land from everyone, killed more of the young than any emperor, and presided over a deadlier famine. For a publication committed to accountability, the lesson of Tikimt 23 is neither nostalgia nor contempt. Institutions built over centuries, the crown, the Church, the law and the memory of Adwa, should be reformed with care rather than torn down in a season, and rights written into a constitution must be lived as well as proclaimed.

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“Forty-four years, at a glance”

Date	Event
23 July 1892	Tafari Makonnen born at Ejersa Goro, Harar
1 March 1896	Victory at Adwa
1906	Death of Ras Makonnen; Tafari joins Menelik’s court
27 September 1916	Lij Iyasu deposed; Zewditu Empress, Tafari regent and heir
28 September 1923	Ethiopia admitted to the League of Nations
1924	Tafari’s European tour
7 October 1928	Tafari crowned Negus
31 March 1930	Battle of Anchem; Ras Gugsa Welle killed
2 April 1930	Death of Empress Zewditu
2 November 1930	Coronation of Haile Selassie I and Empress Menen
16 July 1931	First written Constitution
3 October 1935	Italian invasion
30 June 1936	Address to the League of Nations, Geneva
19 February 1937	Yekatit 12 massacre in Addis Ababa
5 May 1941	Return to Addis Ababa
1945	Founding member of the UN; Ethiopian Airlines founded
1951–1954	Kagnew Battalion in Korea
1952	Federation with Eritrea
4 November 1955	Revised Constitution with a chapter of rights
1957–1965	Modern penal, civil and commercial codes enacted
December 1960	Attempted coup by the Imperial Guard
1962	Eritrea annexed
25 May 1963	OAU founded in Addis Ababa
1966	Ministry of Land Reform created; gult privileges abolished
1967	Agricultural income tax introduced
1972–1973	Wollo famine
12 September 1974	Emperor deposed by the Derg
23 November 1974	Execution of some sixty former officials
March 1975	Monarchy abolished; all rural land nationalised
27 August 1975	Death of Haile Selassie announced
1977–1978	Red Terror
1984–1985	Great famine under the Derg
5 November 2000	Burial at Holy Trinity Cathedral