The last emperor of Ethiopia, crowned in 1930 as Haile Selassie I, who modernized an ancient sacred monarchy while keeping near-absolute power, became a global symbol of African independence through his 1936 appeal to the League of Nations and his hosting of the Organization of African Unity in 1963, was revered half a world away as a living god by the Rastafari movement though he remained a devout Orthodox Christian, and was finally deposed in the 1974 revolution after a concealed famine, dying in detention in 1975.
In June 1936, a small, bearded man in a dark cape stood at the rostrum of the League of Nations in Geneva. He was an emperor without a country. Fascist Italy had bombed and gassed Ethiopia and driven him into exile. The assembled delegates of the world's great powers had done nothing. He told them, in measured words, that the same fate awaited them next, that what had happened to a small African nation would soon reach Europe. Within three years he was proved right. Haile Selassie was many things at once: an absolute monarch who claimed descent from Solomon, a worshipped god to a faith he never founded, and a man finally undone at home by famine and revolution.