The Lion of Judah in the New World: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Shaping of Americans’ Attitude toward Africa (review)

“In present-day Ethiopia,” begins this fascinating book, “few know just how popular their monarch was in the New World” (xi). This is a valid observation, but we could also say the same about the younger generation in present-day America. Compared to the situation in the past, the image of Ethiopia in the minds of most Americans is much less positive today, and far fewer Americans have memories of the Haile Selassie. Vestal claims that “the images of Africa and of Africans that the American people developed during Haile Selassie’s prominence will no doubt be referred to by historians, psychologists, and sociologist—as well as the media—as having played a part in the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008” (xiii). This claim cannot be determined empirically, but this book is nevertheless invaluable for at least three groups of scholars: experts and students of Africa, comparative historians, and political scientists.

For Africanists, it contains rich data about a long-reigning monarch in northeast Africa which have either been unknown before or not systematically organized. There is much in the book about the personality and political instincts of Haile Selassie, especially as they pertain to his foreign policies. Comparative historians will benefit from its accounts of the monarch’s perspectives on pan-Africanism and collective security. And political scientists will have much to learn here about the nuances of the relationship between a weak state in the periphery and a rising global power.

Clearly many Americans were fascinated by Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1954 the New York Times wrote that he was “a man of courage, intelligence and great humanity” (89), and it printed the full text of his speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. In a period of less than ten years, Haile Selassie was twice named Time magazine’s man of the year. American presidents who knew Haile Selassie, too, were unreserved in their praise for the African monarch. During his first state visit to the U.S. in 1954 Dwight Eisenhower described the him as “a defender of freedom and a supporter of progress” (53), and he was appreciative of the emperor’s decision to send Ethiopian troops to fight alongside Americans in Korea. Harry Truman by and large ignored him, perhaps because the relationship between the two countries was stable and Truman was preoccupied with the emerging challenge from the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy, however, was intrigued by Haile Selassie, and one measure of Haile Selassie’s weight in the eyes of America’s political class was that he was the only African leader to be invited to attend Kennedy’s funeral. In 1963 President Lyndon Johnson told the emperor that he looked to him for advice and counsel, and President Nixon honored him by inviting him to the U.S. as the first foreign leader to visit the White House after he was elected president. As for Haile Selassie’s own attitudes toward America’s presidents, it appears that he was deferential toward Eisenhower, indifferent toward Truman (whom he met possibly only once at the funeral ceremony for John F. Kennedy in November 1963), affectionate toward Kennedy, puzzled by Johnson, and disillusioned with Nixon.

Theory is thin in the book, but this is not a limitation, given its specific goal of presenting “an American’s view of an Ethiopian’s influence on Americans . . . ” (xiii). And yet this is also a book about the convergence of interests between Ethiopia and the U.S. in a specific historical period. The author does, thus, whet the reader’s theoretical appetite in Chapter 8 by examining briefly the concepts of soft power and hard power from the perspectives of realist and liberal theories of international relations—ideas that might be linked to...