ASFA-WOSSEN Asserrate’s fascinating biography of his great uncle, Haile Selassie I (1892–1975), last Emperor of Ethiopia, first appeared in English several years ago and it set me thinking about the true nature of what is described by modern historians as “post-colonialism”.

In 1962, Asserrate tells us, Ethiopia hosted the first congress of the Pan African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA) and, one year later, was at the forefront of an attempt to form twenty-eight African nations into the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). This is perfectly correct, of course, but it is my opinion that these developments were merely designed to give the misleading impression that Africans had swept away the colonial regimes of the past and were now gathering together to collectively determine their own destinies.

Haile Selassie – who is worshipped by Rastafarians and celebrated in the world of reggae music as a god – had been temporarily deposed in 1935, after an invasion by Italian fascists, but after a five-year exile in England he was subsequently returned to power by the British and then took out huge loans from the Americans in order to strengthen his regime and modernise Ethiopia itself. In other words, despite the defeat of the Italian colonialists Haile Selassie had now become a vassal of the Western powers.

Returning to what I said previously, about the Emperor hosting a 1962 congress of the PAFMECSA for “liberated nations”, what historians often neglect to mention is that just four years earlier the African continent had already undergone an extensive reorganisation under the auspices of the Economic Commission of the United Nations in Africa (ECA). The seat of this new organisation was based in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, so the reality of the situation is that the puppet-emperor, Haile Selassie, had already been plotting behind the scenes with his Western masters to put into place an economic strategy that would, by the time the 1962 congress came along, be used to bring all the “post-colonial” nations into line. In effect, therefore, those countries which had successfully resisted European domination – if, indeed, that ever happened in the first place – were secretly brought into a new deal that would restore the power of the colonial exploiters.

Asserate doesn’t mention this fact, naturally, being a relation of the Emperor himself, but one interesting footnote to all this is that one of the participants in the PAFMECSA congress was none other than Nelson Mandela (1918–2013). The latter received military training from the Ethiopian Army and even learnt how to make explosives, but when he returned to South Africa in 1963 he was arrested within six months and would not be released for another twenty-seven years. Mandela had a very positive view of Haile Selassie, which probably demonstrates just how shallow his revolutionary credentials really were, but this episode suggests – and this is my own theory – that Mandela may, through Ethiopia, have been trained by the West, sent on his way and then, after a campaign of violence in which many innocent people were murdered, handed the South African authorities a convenient excuse to arrest him. Haile Selassie, therefore, appears to have performed a very interesting role for those who had returned him to power.

It is always very interesting to re-examine such events and there are obvious parallels with the manner in which the West arms terrorist organisations today and then, amid a climate of fear and instability, is able to justify its own excesses.