Tekle Wolde Hawaryat

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Tekle Wolde Hawaryat (1900–17 November 1969) was an Ethiopian politician known for opposing Haile Selassie for much of his life.

He was educated at a church school on Mount Entoto with friends such as Makonnen Habte-Wold and Blattengeta Heruy Welde Sellase. He became a deacon and served in the palace of Emperor Menelik. There he caught the attention of the future emperor, who made him customs director in western Ethiopia and, later, director-general of Addis Ababa at the start of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Before the war he spoke out against European colonialism.

In 1926, Tekle wrote a sharp critique of colonial rule in response to a Berhanena Salam article that compared independent Ethiopia to Italian Eritrea. He used an allegory to describe how colonial subjects were kept like a bird in a cage.

Tekle’s break with Haile Selassie came when the Emperor decided to leave Ethiopia to address the League of Nations after Ethiopia’s defeat. Tekle chose to stay and resist. On May 1, 1936, he confronted the Emperor with a pistol barrel in his mouth, asking, “Are you not the son of Theodore?” After Haile Selassie left Addis Ababa, Tekle gathered his partisans and continued fighting, joining the garrison at Jimma and then moving with Ras Imru Haile Selassie to the wilderness between Jimma and Gore. When Ras Imru rejected guerrilla strategies, Tekle went his own way and tried to unite the scattered resistance fighters, but with little success.

Tekle adopted Republican ideas that had influenced Dire Dawa’s intellectuals. He traveled to Khartoum and warned Ethiopian notables there about how the British viewed Ethiopians, urging Haile Selassie to raise his own army rather than rely on the British. The meeting did not settle matters, and Tekle then went to Kenya to seek supporters. Haile Selassie later pressed the British to help form an Ethiopian army of liberation, and Tekle did what he could to oppose the Emperor’s restoration.

Tekle was imprisoned from 1942 to 1945, then released. The Emperor tried to placate him by making him afenegus (a regional governor-general), but he was caught in another plot and imprisoned longer, until 1954. He regained the afenegus title only to lose it after yet another failed plot. In old age, he remained active in plots against the Emperor and was found to be at the center of a plan to kill Haile Selassie with a landmine near Sebeta. Tekle Wolde Hawaryat was killed in a shootout with police at his Addis Ababa home.