While the new states struggled to establish themselves, Africa had an emperor whose country – apart from six years of Italian occupation – had never been colonized.
THE LION OF JUDAH – AND THE AFRICAN PIMPERNEL
On 13 December 1960, when Haile Selassie, now sixty-eight and in power since 1916, was visiting Brazil, a junta of his courtiers seized most of his cabinet at the Menelik Palace and launched a coup – Africa’s first. Outside Ethiopia he was an African hero, the Lion of Judah; at home, he was an isolated autocrat who was building an empire.
Everything was centred in his person at the Menelik Palace, where in Amharic it was said you had to ‘let your face be slapped’ and ‘wait a long time outside the gate’ if you wanted to be noticed by the emperor.
The negus had formed interlocking security agencies, the Department of Public Security and the even more secret Imperial Private Cabinet which watched his own ministers, who were constantly moved from job to job, except for the devoted minister of the pen. But this tight control blinded him: he promoted a talented officer, Workneh Gebeyehu, from head of the security agency to chief of chancellery. But then the favourite suggested that the old negus should abdicate in favour of the crown prince. ‘Workneh,’ replied the negus, ‘we’re dismayed to find you’re still a child. We’ll continue to exercise power the Almighty has vested in us to the end. Besides: have you ever heard of anyone voluntarily relinquishing power?’ Workneh conspired with two of the emperor’s other favourites to overthrow the Lion. Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen agreed to broadcast a ‘revolutionary proclamation’ that he was now regent of a constitutional government: ‘Today is the start of a new era.’ But the emperor rushed back from Brazil.
At the airport, his son lay in the dust at his feet. Raising him, Haile Selassie said, ‘We would have been proud of you if We were coming to attend your funeral. Get up!’ Their relationship never recovered. The Lion’s troops attacked the rebels in the streets of Addis. Two thousand were killed. When imperial tanks attacked the palace where the ministers were held, the rebels killed fifteen ministers and generals. The ex-favourite Workneh shot himself, and his body was strung up outside St George’s Cathedral.
‘There’ll be no change in the system,’ announced the Lion, who now moved into the new Jubilee Palace. The heir to Menelik II, he was an empire builder: after the British had occupied the Italian colony of Eritrea in 1946, the UN placed it in a federation with Ethiopia, but Haile Selassie annexed it in 1962 and banned political parties that disagreed. Like all empires, Ethiopia was held together by force. Rebellions in Eritrea and the Somalian Ogaden became festering wars of conquest.
Yet Haile Selassie was the iconic African leader. In February 1962, he invited African freedom fighters to a Pan-African Freedom Movement conference in Addis Ababa, at which, wearing a gorgeously braided, bemedalled uniform, he was the first speaker. He was followed by a South African lawyer, travelling for the first time: Nelson Mandela. The forty-three-year-old Mandela was fascinated by ‘how small the emperor appeared, but his dignity and confidence made him seem like the African giant he was’. This was so even though Ethiopia was no democracy: ‘Only the emperor was supreme.’
Mandela – clan name Madiba – was a prince of the Xhosa people of Thembu, in Transkei, northern Cape, descended from King Zwide. His father, counsellor of the Thembu king, was sacked for defying the British, but Mandela was adopted by his people’s charismatic regent and raised with the princes. ‘My later notions of leadership were influenced by observing the regent,’ who groomed him to be counsellor, sending him to Methodist boarding schools. After qualifying as a lawyer and marrying a nurse Evelyn, the tall, handsome Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC), because ‘To be an African in South Africa means one’s politicized from birth.’ Mandela devoted his life to the campaign against apartheid. He was repeatedly arrested, his dedication leading to the estrangement of his wife, with whom he had a son. Then: ‘As I passed a bus stop, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a lovely young woman waiting for the bus.’ Mandela fell in love with Winnie Madikizela – ‘her passion, her youth, her courage, her wilfulness’ – and ‘My love for her gave me added strength for the struggles that lay ahead,’ and two children.
In 1960, police in Sharpeville killed sixty-nine protesters and wounded 249, igniting further protests for which Mandela was arrested. But when he was acquitted ‘I became a creature of the night,’ nicknamed the Black Pimpernel. He now founded the ANC’s military wing – Spear of the Nation – which started a bombing campaign. Haile Selassie invited Mandela and his comrades for military training. But when he got home from Addis, the Pimpernel was arrested.
In prison, ‘The officer turned a blind eye [to him and Winnie] and we embraced and clung to each other.’ At his trial for high treason and terrorism Mandela, dressed not in a suit but in a Xhosa leopard-skin kaross, declared in a speech, ‘I am prepared to die.’ On 12 June 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Confined on Robben Island – from where only one prisoner had ever escaped to the mainland – the guards greeted him by chanting in Afrikaans: ‘This is the island. Here you will die!’ When he was defiant, they threatened, ‘Look, man, we’ll kill you, no fooling, your wives and children will never know what happened.’
Mandela deployed steely discipline and daily meditation to survive, writing to Winnie that prison was ‘an ideal place to learn to know yourself … At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good,’ adding, ‘Never forget a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.’ While he was away, his eldest son was killed in a crash, and Winnie often arrested. In his letters to her, he acclaimed ‘your devastating beauty and charm … Remember, hope is a powerful weapon when all else is lost … You’re in my thoughts every moment.’ His twenty-seven years in prison corroded their marriage yet burnished his legend.
Meanwhile, on 25 May 1963, in Addis, Haile Selassie, paragon of African rulers, invited his rivals to the first meeting of his Organization of African Unity: Nkrumah, Anglophone Marxist, hoped to lead a United States of Africa with its own army; Francophone Papa, Houphouët of Ivory Coast, mocked his ambitions. Haile Selassie held the balance between the two, leading the organization before handing over to Nkrumah the Redeemer.
‘I know decolonization is disastrous,’ said de Gaulle privately. ‘They’re again going to experience tribal wars, witchcraft, cannibalism,’ yet ‘The Americans and Russians think they’ve a vocation to free colonized populations and are outbidding each other.’ Khrushchev was the first to spot the opportunity of ‘uprisings against rotten reactionary regimes, against colonizers’, promising ‘to march in the front rank with peoples fighting national liberation struggles’. The proxy wars of the superpowers – a second scramble, this time in the name of decolonization and freedom – would kill more Africans than the first.
It started in early 1960, when the Belgians had suddenly lost control of Congo. After the Force Publique shot demonstrators in the streets, they held elections and King Baudouin (great-grandson of Leopold II) praised Belgium’s ‘civilizing mission’ as he conceded independence in June 1960. Meanwhile Belgium, hoping to keep control of military and resources (Congo possessed uranium among other mineral treasures), organized the overthrow of the elected first premier, Patrice Lumumba, thirty-five – a talented pan-Africanist but also a Soviet ally – by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, Force Publique officer, now chief of staff. Mobutu was the first of many politicised generals who demonstrated how often in the new African states, conglomerated by the colonial powers into huge new entities, the army emerged as the embodiment of the nation. Astonishingly, the Belgians ordered Lumumba’s ‘elimination definitive’, their agents seizing, torturing then shooting him before dissolving him in acid. A Belgian agent took one of his teeth home as a trophy. Khrushchev was infuriated as Mobutu, backed by the USA, established a baroque, kleptocratic dictatorship of Zaire that lasted for thirty years.*