Home > 2025 > Ethiopia

Mainstream, Vol 63 No 33, Aug 16, 2025

Ethiopia

Sunday 17 August 2025

In the global reckoning with slavery, Ethiopia occupies an ambiguous space. Often romanticised as the lone African polity to successfully resist European colonisation and celebrated in the pan-African imagination as a beacon of Black sovereignty, Ethiopia has long been cloaked in an aura of moral immunity. Nowhere is this mythology more evident than in the figure of Emperor Haile Selassie I, the so-called