The 1974 Ethiopian Revolution and the Fall of Haile Selassie

On September 12, 1974, a committee of military officers calling itself the Derg (Amharic for “committee”) deposed Emperor Haile Selassie I, ending a reign of more than four decades and, with it, Ethiopia’s centuries-old imperial monarchy. The emperor, by then 82 years old, was driven from his palace in a small Volkswagen rather than his usual state car, a detail widely reported at the time as a deliberate humiliation, and held under house arrest.

The revolution had been building for months. A famine in Wollo and Tigray provinces had killed an estimated 100,000 people in 1973 and severely damaged the government’s credibility once foreign journalists exposed how little the imperial administration had done to respond. Mutinies over pay spread through army units in early 1974, students and unions pressed for reform, and the Derg, initially formed as a body to investigate military grievances, steadily absorbed power from Haile Selassie’s civilian ministers over the following months before moving against the emperor himself. The monarchy was formally abolished on March 27, 1975, and the Derg installed a Marxist-Leninist state under, eventually, Mengistu Haile Mariam, beginning a period of one-party rule and internal purges that lasted until 1991.

Haile Selassie died on August 27, 1975, roughly eleven months after his removal, while still in detention. The Derg’s official statement attributed his death to complications following a prostate operation. That account has never been widely accepted. Testimony that surfaced years later, including statements attributed to former Derg officials, alleged that the emperor was suffocated or strangled on the orders of the ruling committee, and his remains were not given a state burial at the time; they were found buried beneath a palace latrine in 1992 and not formally interred until 2000. Historians and journalists who have examined the case generally agree the official cause of death was a cover story, but the exact method and chain of command behind his killing have never been conclusively documented, and reputable sources continue to describe the specifics as disputed rather than settled.

The revolution is often described as ending “3,000 years” of monarchy, a figure rooted in Ethiopian royal tradition rather than verified history. That tradition, recorded in the fourteenth-century text known as the Kebra Nagast, traces the imperial line to Menelik I, said to be the son of the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a genealogy modern historians regard as legend rather than documented fact. The historically attested Solomonic dynasty, the one Haile Selassie actually belonged to, was founded considerably later: in 1270, when the nobleman Yekuno Amlak overthrew the ruling Zagwe dynasty and claimed descent from that same Solomonic line to legitimize his rule. By that verified measure, the dynasty the Derg abolished in 1975 had lasted just over 700 years, not three millennia: still one of the longest-running monarchies in world history, even without the legendary extension.