Conquering Lion of Judah, King of Kings, Elect of God: in the end, the royal epithets had a hollow, mocking ring. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, had wielded virtually absolute power for almost six decades—longer than any other contemporary head of state. But when he was finally deposed in September 1974 by the military leaders of the "creeping coup," which had been enveloping Ethiopia for seven months, the tiny (5 ft. 4 in.) ruler was whisked away from his palace in a Volkswagen and imprisoned in a three-room mud hut. Only later was he moved to more comfortable quarters at the Grand Palace. It was there that the aged Lion, still caged, died in his sleep last week, apparently from the aftereffects of recent prostate surgery. He was 83.
Certainly he had clung to power too long for his own good. Haile Selassie was a prisoner of his country's feudal system and backwardness long before he became a prisoner of his own army. His captors charged him with massive corruption and put out rumors—never confirmed—of a fortune totaling several billion dollars salted away in foreign banks. He was also accused of deliberately concealing—for reasons of misplaced national pride or merely personal pride—the extent of the drought and famine that killed 100,000 Ethiopians in 1973-74. Whatever the validity of the charges, they obscure the reputation of the man who in an earlier era tried desperately to bring Ethiopia into the modern world and who, toward the end of his life, became the grand old man of independent Africa. He was the primary force behind the founding of the Organization for African Unity in 1963, and his capital city, Addis Ababa, became its headquarters.
Throughout the Western world, he will perhaps be best remembered for his appearance before the League of Nations in Geneva on June 30, 1936. His country had been overrun by the Blackshirt battalions of Benito Mussolini, whose son-in-law, Count Ciano, ecstatically described the beauty of "bombs opening like red blossoms" upon the Ethiopian highlands. Hundreds of thousands of his barefoot soldiers had been killed by Fascist bombs and mustard gas. A small, bearded, hawk-faced figure with blazing black eyes, he stood at the lectern and declared: "I am here today to claim the justice that is due to my people ... God and history will remember your judgment." Then, as he stepped down, he murmured the words that were to serve as an epitaph not only for the impotent League but for the whole prewar world. "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow."
Some delegates were sympathetic, some embarrassed, but the League took no action against Mussolini. Haile Selassie returned to England, where he lived in a modest manor house outside Bath. Almost five years later, after the British army had driven the Italians from Addis Ababa, he returned to his mountain capital in triumph. His nation had lost several hundred thousand men in battle and in mass executions, but the Emperor issued orders to his countrymen that the Italian civilians who chose to stay in Ethiopia should be allowed to do so undisturbed.