Ethiopia

Ethiopia has a long history: the Kingdom of Damot was established about 3000 years ago. The Aksumite Kingdom later adopted Christianity in the 4th century A.D. The Solomonic Dynasty, which took power in 1270, came to dominate the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia's relative isolation started to end under Emperor Tewodros II, whose reign ended in suicide after a British expedition routed his army at Arogye in 1868. Successor Yohannes IV defeated an Egyptian invasion in the mid-1870s. Menelik II, who ruled from 1889 to 1913, defeated an Italian force at Adwa in 1896 and took the Empire to its territorial peak. (His conquests in regions like Omoro often turned brutal.) In an age when most of Africa was being partitioned among Europe's colonial powers, Ethiopian sovereignty was explicitly recognized in the Treaty of Addis Ababa.

After Haile Selassie became Emperor in 1930, his moves toward modernization include a modern 1931 constitution and the 1941 abolition of slavery. The great crisis of his early reign was the 1935 invasion by Mussolini's Italy, which already controlled Eritrea to the north and southern Somaliland to the southeast. (The French and British had also colonized Djibouti and northern Somaliland to the east.) Italy occupied the country for the next five years until Italy entered World War II and the exiled Emperor returned in triumph with the support of the Allied Powers. Eritrea entered a federation with Ethiopia under United Nations sponsorship, but in 1962 Ethiopia seized the region outright, and a three-decade war ensued with Eritrea finally gaining independence in 1991. With successive African colonies gaining independence, the Emperor helped found the Organization of African Unity in 1963.

Haile Sellassie lived too long. Incapable of dealing with famine in Wollow and Tigray, the Solomonic Dynasty's last emperor was deposed in 1974, imprisoned and put to death the following year. For the next 17 years the Marxist Derg junta under Mengistu Haile Mariam ruled the nation with an iron fist. The population suffered through the Red Terror of 1977, wars with Somalia (over Ogaden province) and Eritrean insurgents, and an even worse famine.

The Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Front, a coalition of rebel forces that defeated the Derg in 1991, dominated Ethiopian politics for the next generation under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. (Under current leader Abiy Ahmed, it evolved into the Prosperity Party in 2019.) Today's Ethiopia is one of Africa's largest nations, with over 100 million people, and despite recent economic growth remains fairly poor.

For background reading you can try Saheed A. Adejumobi's The HIstory of Ethiopia.

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