A political succession after a death of the head of government in Ethiopia, certainly does not have the same resonance in the Caribbean today, that it would have had either when Haile Selassie was removed (some claim smothered to death) in 1974, or even when his successor Haile Mariam Mengistu was overthrown in 1987, after a civil war led by forces effectively under the command of Meles Zenawi who assumed power as Prime Minister in 1991, and died in the course of medical attention in Brussels last week.
Selassie’s departure brought to a virtual end the hero-worship of one who, particularly for the Rastafarian forces and sympathisers in Jamaica, but elsewhere in the Caribbean too, was seen as a living God; and who had an identity in Africa and in the Caribbean as a symbol of African opposition to the Fascist forces of the Second World War,
