Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
""No other African leader during the independence era was revered so widely as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. His defiant stand against Mussolini’s brutal invasion in the 1930s had won him worldwide fame. Restored to his throne in the 1940s, he stood as the symbol of an independent Africa that nationalist leaders living under colonial rule all aspired to achieve. His position as monarch of a state that traced its origins back to biblical times, that possessed a national Christian church with a tradition older than that of many European churches, as well as an ancient liturgical language and a sacred literature, all served to endow him with immense prestige. Adding to the awe in which he was held was a mystique about the monarchy that was carefully preserved. According to the Ethiopian constitution, the emperor was descended directly from the marriage of Solomon and Sheba, and among the titles with which he was graced was that of ‘Elect of God’. His divine right to rule was devoutly upheld by the Orthodox Church through its multitude of monasteries, churches and priests. . . . What helped to sustain his power was the considerable extent to which the emperor, together with the Coptic Church and influential aristocratic families in the provinces, owned and controlled land and thereby the livelihood of millions of peasants who worked it. About three-quarters of Ethiopia’s peasant farmers were tenants. . . . Tenants lived in perpetual fear of eviction. A diminutive figure, outwardly mild-mannered, Haile Selassie was ruthless not only in crushing opposition to his rule in the further reaches of the empire but in extending its boundaries. The inner core of the empire consisted of the mountains and plateaux of central Ethiopia populated by Amharas and Tigrayans bound together by ancient ties of history and religion. But the outer regions had been added by conquest during Emperor Menelik’s reign at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time that European powers were engaged in their Scramble for Africa, Menelik extended Ethiopian rule over Oromo territory to the south and Somali territory to the south-east, notably the Ogaden plateau, doubling the size of the empire. [The Fate of Africa, p. 206-8]