Great men rarely come smaller than Haile Selassie. In photographs, the golden crowns, pith helmets and grey felt homburgs he often donned can’t conceal the fact that he is the shortest man in the room. It didn’t matter: for the 44 years of his reign — with a five-year interruption engineered by Benito Mussolini’s invading troops — he was effectively lord of all he surveyed.
Ethiopia’s current government, established by a former Marxist rebel group, has always harboured mixed feelings towards Tafari Makonnen, as he was baptised. But for his countrymen he looms like a colossus, remembered for dragging his vast empire from feudalism into the modern age, and as a symbol of anti-colonialism who shamed the League of Nations for failing to stand up to fascism and went on to found the Organisation of African Unity.
Enigmatic, arrogant and aloof, he pulled off the paradoxical feat of being both a radical reformer and a hidebound dictator who insisted on the literalism of the title ‘Elect of God’ and came to be worshipped as a deity himself by the Rastafarian movement.
A full-scale biography has been missing up till now, perhaps because the emperor recorded a detailed, if partial, memoir with the British historian Edward Ullendorff. This latest account, translated from German, is particularly welcome because Asfa-Wossen Asserate, a prince by birth, is Haile Selassie’s great nephew. His nobleman father went from rallying support for the emperor during a first failed coup in 1960 to begging his ageing leader to abdicate, and was finally one of 60 officials executed during a second, successful coup which ushered in a military dictatorship. So in theory this is that precious thing: an African history written by an insider.
Initially, however, the author fails to deliver on that promise of privileged access.
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