The World

On 28 August, after Bobby Kennedy had ordered his release, he led his March to Washington for Jobs and Freedom, backed by JFK. In front of the Lincoln Memorial he addressed hundreds of thousands: ‘I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.’ Kennedy’s first attempt at a Civil Rights Bill failed, but he tried again.

As King campaigned, the young Kenyan, Barack Obama senior, a scholar partly funded by Kennedy, had enrolled as the first African student at Hawaii University. In early 1960, in a Russian class, Obama met a white American anthropology student who gloried in the name Stanley Ann Dunham. ‘He was black as pitch,’ wrote their son Barack Obama later, ‘my mother white as milk,’ yet they were welcomed by his grandparents. The Dunhams from Kansas, descended from a Union soldier, a cousin of Jefferson Davis, and a Cherokee, were freethinking liberals. After Ann brought a black girl home to play and a neighbour said, ‘You best talk to your daughter, Mr Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town,’ they moved to Hawaii.

‘Brilliant, opinionated and charismatic’, Obama, scholar, talker and dandy, favouring blazers, ascot hats and smoking a pipe, was masterful, irrepressible but also reckless and unpredictable: when a friend nudged his pipe off a cliff, Obama senior ‘picked him clear off the ground and started dangling him over the railing’. On 4 August 1961, Ann gave birth to a son, Barack junior, but Obama was restless and the marriage failed. Ann started a relationship with an Indonesian student that took mother and son to Indonesia. ‘Your father could handle just about anything,’ the boy’s grandfather told Barack junior later. Nonetheless, Barack senior hardly saw his son again, moving to Harvard, where he married a young Jewish student. But the career of the son would change the USA – while his father, intense and troubled, returned to Kenya, where Kenyatta, finally released by the British, and Mboya were negotiating independence.

While the new states struggled to establish themselves, Africa had an emperor whose country – apart from six years of Italian occupation – had never been colonized.

THE LION OF JUDAH – AND THE AFRICAN PIMPERNEL

On 13 December 1960, when Haile Selassie, now sixty-eight and in power since 1916, was visiting Brazil, a junta of his courtiers seized most of his cabinet at the Menelik Palace and launched a coup – Africa’s first. Outside Ethiopia he was an African hero, the Lion of Judah; at home, he was an isolated autocrat who was building an empire.

Everything was centred in his person at the Menelik Palace, where in Amharic it was said you had to ‘let your face be slapped’ and ‘wait a long time outside the gate’ if you wanted to be noticed by the emperor.

The negus had formed interlocking security agencies, the Department of Public Security and the even more secret Imperial Private Cabinet which watched his own ministers, who were constantly moved from job to job, except for the devoted minister of the pen. But this tight control blinded him: he promoted a talented officer, Workneh Gebeyehu, from head of the security agency to chief of chancellery. But then the favourite suggested that the old negus should abdicate in favour of the crown prince. ‘Workneh,’ replied the negus

, ‘we’re dismayed to find you’re still a child. We’ll continue to exercise power the Almighty has vested in us to the end. Besides: have you ever heard of anyone voluntarily relinquishing power?’ Workneh conspired with two of the emperor’s other favourites to overthrow the Lion. Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen agreed to broadcast a ‘revolutionary proclamation’ that he was now regent of a constitutional government: ‘Today is the start of a new era.’ But the emperor rushed back from Brazil.

At the airport, his son lay in the dust at his feet. Raising him, Haile Selassie said, ‘We would have been proud of you if We were coming to attend your funeral. Get up!’ Their relationship never recovered. The Lion’s troops attacked the rebels in the streets of Addis. Two thousand were killed. When imperial tanks attacked the palace where the ministers were held, the rebels killed fifteen ministers and generals. The ex-favourite Workneh shot himself, and his body was strung up outside St George’s Cathedral.

‘There’ll be no change in the system,’ announced the Lion, who now moved into the new Jubilee Palace. The heir to Menelik II, he was an empire builder: after the British had occupied the Italian colony of Eritrea in 1946, the UN placed it in a federation with Ethiopia, but Haile Selassie annexed it in 1962 and banned political parties that disagreed. Like all empires, Ethiopia was held together by force. Rebellions in Eritrea and the Somalian Ogaden became festering wars of conquest.