Haile Selassie

Born Tafari Makonnen on 23 July 1892 near Harar, he became regent of Ethiopia in 1916 and was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I on 2 November 1930. As Ras Tafari he gave his name to the Rastafari movement, which emerged in Jamaica soon after his coronation.

When Fascist Italy invaded in 1935, he led the resistance and then, on 30 June 1936, appealed in person to the League of Nations in Geneva, warning that collective security was at stake: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." The League failed to act. He spent five years in exile, much of it in Bath, England, and returned to Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941 after British and Ethiopian forces drove the Italians out.

After the war he made Addis Ababa a capital of the newly independent continent. In May 1963 he hosted the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, and in October that year he told the United Nations that until the philosophy holding one race superior to another was finally discredited, there would be war. His long reign also brought autocracy and, in 1973, a famine his government hid. He was deposed by the military Derg on 12 September 1974 and died in its custody on 27 August 1975.