On November 2, 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in a ceremony in Addis Ababa. He took the name that means "Might of the Trinity" and became the ruler of one of the few states in Africa never taken by a European power.
Ethiopia stood alone. He had served as regent for the child heir to Menelik II and had spent years steering the country toward reform. The crown passed to him after the line of the earlier emperor failed.
The throne was old. The task was new.
Haile Selassie set out to modernize the army, schools, and the written law, and he traveled abroad to join the League of Nations as Ethiopia's voice, a move that mattered because the country was already a target of Italy's fascist government, which would invade in 1935 and force him into exile before he returned in 1941 with Allied help.
He ruled, with one long break, until 1974. His name lives on far outside Ethiopia, where the Rastafari movement took him as a figure of liberation, and his coronation date is still marked in the country's memory.
His coronation drew rulers and clergy from across the region, a show of the reach Ethiopia still held as the only free African state of size. The new emperor used the ceremony to signal that his country meant to stand among modern nations, not behind them.