Chapter Ten - Empire in Crisis

CHAPTER TEN

Empire in Crisis

THE 1970S DIDN’T start with a bang in Ethiopia.

They started with a hunger.

A long, quiet, creeping disaster that everyone felt — and no one dared talk about.

Because by then, Haile Selassie’s empire wasn’t burning. It was decaying. And decay is slow, subtle, and deeply polite… until it isn’t.

The 1960s had given Selassie global status. He was the elder statesman of Africa. The wise monarch. The survivor.

But in Ethiopia?

He was starting to look like the past.

He was in his 70s now. Still regal, still speaking with gravity, still holding meetings in gilded rooms filled with incense and protocol. But the world had changed. His people had changed. And worst of all — they were starving.

A brutal famine struck the Wollo and Tigray regions in the early 1970s. Crops failed. Markets dried up. Villagers died in silence. The nobility turned a blind eye. The emperor’s court brushed it off. It was “a rural issue.” It wasn’t their problem.

But someone leaked the truth.

A British journalist exposed it on international television — footage of starving children, emaciated farmers, funerals by the dozens.

And suddenly, the world saw what Selassie’s own government wouldn’t:
a kingdom cracking under its own weight.

The people didn’t riot at first.
They questioned.

Then they criticized.
Then they organized.

University students — once proud of their ancient emperor — began demanding answers. Why was so much money spent on imperial palaces while the people starved? Why was dissent silenced? Why was press controlled? Why were they learning French poetry when their families couldn’t afford bread?

Selassie didn’t answer. He tightened the leash.

He believed in order. Discipline. Gradualism. And he believed that kings don’t justify themselves to the crowd.

But the crowd didn’t believe in kings anymore.

Meanwhile, the military — long neglected, poorly paid, and stretched thin — began to murmur. Officers felt disrespected. Soldiers felt ignored. Promotions were erratic. Weapons were outdated. The navy barely had working ships.

Some blamed the ministers.
Some blamed the nobility.
Most blamed the old man in the palace.

A storm was building.

Marxist ideas spread underground — through pamphlets, late-night meetings, whispers between students and soldiers. The revolutionary fever that had gripped Latin America and Asia was now slipping through the cracks in the Ethiopian throne room.

Selassie still smiled for the cameras.

But the myth was dimming.

One final image captured it all:
A university protester holding up a sign with Selassie’s face — and a red line drawn through it.
That wouldn’t have happened in the 1930s. Or even the 1960s.

But now?
The emperor had lost the room.

And behind the scenes, a shadow council was forming.

Low-ranking officers. Radical thinkers. Angry students.
They called themselves the Derg.

And they weren’t planning reforms.

They were planning a reckoning.