The ruler of the African state that had beaten Italy at Adwa, who modernised it from the throne, lost it to Mussolini's gas, and stood in Geneva to tell the League what its silence meant.
The fork
30 June 1936. An exiled emperor addresses the League of Nations while Italian journalists jeer from the gallery. His warning, that what was done to Ethiopia would be done to others, is heard and set aside. Days later the League votes to lift its sanctions.
What they wanted
Ethiopia recognised as a modern state among equals: a League member from 1923, a written constitution in 1931, roads and schools. The throne kept absolute.
What it cost
An autocracy that modernised the army and the court faster than the country, and a famine in the 1970s that ended his reign. That comes later, but the habit of power is already here.
The fight
Symbol of African independence or feudal autocrat? Both, and the second does not cancel the first. To Rastafarians he became a god; to the Ethiopians who overthrew him, an emperor who let them starve.