Makonnen Wolde Mikael

Common card · No. 240963

Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael Wolde Melekot (8 May 1852 – 21 March 1906), known simply as Ras Makonnen, was an Ethiopian military commander, provincial governor and diplomat, and the father of the future Emperor Haile Selassie. Through his mother, a daughter of Negus Sahle Selassie of Shewa, he was a first cousin of Emperor Menelik II, at whose court he was raised from the age of fourteen. He rose through a series of campaigns in the 1870s and 1880s to become, in January 1887, governor of Harar, a post he held until his death, and the Russian poet and traveller Nikolai Gumilev later called him one of the greatest leaders of Abyssinia. As governor, Makonnen built a hospital and schools in Harar, encouraged the extension of the railway, imported the region's first printing press, and helped the French develop the port of Djibouti, while also extending imperial authority east and south into the Ogaden. The historian Tim Carmichael describes him as fair and just toward his subjects, with the exception...

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