and had conferred as a head of state and government with all the giant statesmen of the 20th century, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. He was remembered in the West as a man who courageously, though unsuccessfully, engaged Mussolini’s Fascist army on the battlefield, and then invoked the conscience of the world with his moving and prophetic speech at the League of Nations. When this man appeared before his subjects, they trembled and spontaneously prostrated themselves on the ground, without heed of dust and mud. He was the only living head of state still worshipped as a supernatural being—an inspiration and a godhead for the Rastafarians and reggae stars such as Bob Marley.
The country over which the negus (king) ruled was Ethiopia, a name of romantic fascination since classical times, so inaccessible and remote that Homer in The Odyssey referred to its people as “the distant Ethiopians, the farthest outposts of mankind, half of whom live where the sun goes down and half where he rises.” This ancient kingdom that has carried a charm of mystery for millions throughout the ages has a special place in the history of the world, for it is one of the four oldest nation-states, and one of the three countries with the longest uninterrupted independence in the world. With the exception of Egypt, its continuous historical antecedents are much longer and older than the annals of all the African countries, and more ancient than those of most nations. As analyzed in detail herein, there is a clearly discernible dialectical relationship between the introduction and implementation of Western education in Ethiopia, the cultural matrix molded by these unique historical antecedents, and the sudden and dramatic collapse of Haile Selassie’s modernizing autocracy.
For several decades, Ethiopia’s polity had been straining under the load of a rigid feudal order trying to adjust itself to the modern world. The fall of the ancient regime in 1974 and its political aftermath has been highly misunderstood, often being depicted as just another African military coup d’é#233;tat. Some saw it as part of a struggle for power by different ethnic groups, a struggle that was particularly spearheaded by the Tigrayans and the Oromos against the Amharas.