Many free black states such as Haiti exist today as the vulnerable result of modern racial slavery, having grown out of the slaves’ embattled return to the continent from which their foreparents had been stolen. Ethiopia, on the other hand, was one of the world’s oldest nations: it was an ancient, sovereign power with a biblical pedigree. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its independence and territorial integrity were made into the focus of pan-African consciousness by a series of wars with the invading Italians. The country’s pre-eminent position in the political imagination of African and African-descended peoples derives from the conflict with fascism and from the globalization of black solidarity in which it resulted. During the 1930s, that battle against colonial invasion was fought not only at Tembien and Maychew but also on the streets of New York City among the dispersed affiliates of Africa and Italy.

Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor in 1930. His appearance as the ruler coincided with a tide of Ethiopianist political sentiment across the black Atlantic world, which had been galvanized into action by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The pageantry and discipline of the Garvey movement had restored pride and dignity to new-world black populations scarred by racism. Garvey saw the long-term future of those people through the eventual goal of return to Africa and looked upon that aim as the focal point of restoration and uplift for the descendants of slaves. Selassie’s embattled, feudal kingdom was therefore of the highest importance diplomatically, geopolitically and symbolically. Its international significance contrasted sharply with its internal instability, inequalities, and regional and ethnic divisions.

Ethiopia had not only maintained its historic independence for centuries; it had also, in 1923, joined the League of Nations, where the Emperor pleaded for support against the invaders. That war is remembered now in particular for the Italians’ carefree deployment of chemical weapons, which were rained down on Selassie’s country by Mussolini’s aircraft in violation of Italy’s treaty obligations. Mustard gas was also used against civilian populations judged to be a verminous part of the natural rather than the civilized world.

For the wider black public, born into the era of the newsreel and the radio broadcast, these horrors dramatized the political and economic dynamics of racism and imperialism. Selassie was seen a potent symbol of hope, freedom and resistance against colonial domination. Under his guidance, Ethiopia would be a founding member of the United Nations and of the Organization of African Unity. However he treated his own subjects, the country’s famous ruler aspired to be a modernizer. He was one of the first political thinkers inclined to try and imagine a postcolonial future for the whole continent.

Shemelis Desta was the official chronicler of the later phases of Selassie’s political life. He recorded the Emperor’s travels and his various interactions with a host of stars, celebrities and iconic political leaders. In the course of these duties, Desta created an extensive archive of extraordinary images that placed Ethiopia at the centre of world history.

His photographs are notable for many reasons. Now, they reveal something of the process whereby Selassie became a global figure. We can also track the emergence of independent Africa into a global image-world where the continent’s history could be seen to involve more than a sequence of epic catastrophes. Against the grain of much Eurocentric thinking, Desta fashions Africa into a place with a history rather than a negative metaphysical backdrop to the deeds of bold Europeans.

By the time Desta attained his important official position, the world and the continent were both deeply and bitterly divided along the new axes of the Cold War. Ethiopian troops had, for example, been dispatched to fight in Korea under the banner of the United Nations. Desta’s photographs suggest that Selassie may have been trying to help his nation escape from that polarized geometry of power by steering a path between contending capitalist and communist blocs, while speaking in the cosmopolitan language of human rights. Sadly, that noble variety of rhetoric did not always guide the conduct of domestic policy inside Selassie’s divided kingdom.

We have become accustomed to thinking of the Cold War in exclusively military terms. However, these insightful photographs reveal something of its softer cultural dimensions. Ethiopia’s uneven and ambiguous modernization is communicated in unlikely and shocking images. Desta’s beehived beauty queens contrast sharply with the way he has captured an elaborate reworking of the trappings of colonial power, which accentuates the continuity of the postcolonial country with the expectations and assumptions established during the colonial period. The jarring combination of opulence and poverty asks his viewers difficult questions about the kind of power that operates in an environment that can accommodate such extremes; the revolutionaries and the rebels seem to share the same disturbing appetites as those they have replaced.

The evident militarization of Ethiopia’s postcolonial governments is another striking feature of Desta’s archive. Uniforms and gold braid abound. Every variety of weaponry is visible alongside the unambiguous human consequences of their deployment. The visiting leaders of the communist countries are as decorated and exalted as any of the rest. The recurrence of military symbols, rituals and hierarchies speaks directly to the place of war in creating and shaping not only Ethiopia but also Africa in general. In that setting, Ethiopia’s shiny medals, uniforms and extravagant parades communicate not just a sense of the pomp and tradition involved in nation-building but a broader militarization of life and society in a country where the most advanced economic and technological developments were inorganically combined with the most basic ways of interacting with nature. The centrality of the army to the government was a sign that the resulting tension would be resolved by authoritarian means. The prominence of military force connects the administration of power across undemocratic regimes even when they were ideologically and politically opposed.

Through Desta’s lenses, Selassie’s royal palace appears wired into an evolving global grid. It hosted an extraordinary drama of power that linked the hypermodern with the ancient. The Emperor’s travels consolidated a worldwide network of contacts, friends and crowned heads. All his meetings with the world’s powerful, rich and famous were chronicled by Desta, often in saturated colour which now seems anachronistically vivid. The Emperor’s public appearances and political pronouncements to international audiences were also recorded.

In this period, Selassie was one of a few leaders who provided Africa with a recognizable, historical face. His visitors and global contacts were an interesting group that combined several different constituencies. Their evident diversity suggests that the Emperor was engaged in a delicate and complicated balancing act designed, one imagines, to prevent the possibility of any future colonial intrusions as well as to secure economic and political opportunities for his developing country.

There were the hereditary monarchs from many different nations whom he clearly regarded as his peers. There were also new leaders who spoke for a bloc of younger nations, which was actively separating itself from the old yokes of empire and identifying new interests and relations in the postcolonial environment. Some of that group included revolutionary leaders who had recently fought their way out of the colonial system. There were also religious authorities whose continuous presence attests to the deeply held Christian traditions with which the Ethiopian monarchy was intertwined. Lastly, there were the supporters and friends of Ethiopia, who, like the expatriate English radical Sylvia Pankhurst, had devoted their political lives to the tasks of solidarity and advocacy.

Desta’s pictures are as striking as they are time-bound. His subtle skills capture his subjects in unusual moods and postures. His furtive sense of the moment is unerring. As records of state occasions, many of the images share an air of great formality, which places them emphatically in an age before the institutionalization of the photo opportunity and the complete governmental orchestration of PR. Photographed while waiting or in some fleeting moment of relaxation between their official obligations, Desta’s subjects do not expect their every move to have been photographed or to have been photographable. Many appear to have been caught entirely unawares. The skill to perpetrate what amount to photographic ambushes and record people without their noticing clearly served him well in the final stages of his Ethiopian career.

Selassie is, as we would anticipate, omnipresent. He seems to be a stiff, short figure: upright, composed and with the unflinching monarchical expression of a waxwork. Perhaps he alone understood the consequences of submitting to Desta’s vigilant shutter. The Emperor was often shot in ways that minimized his relative lack of height when compared to his distinguished visitors. This tells us not only that Desta knew the Emperor would examine these photographs but also that the two men may have, in some sense, been partners in their taking.

Whether Selassie was photographed bemedalled on his golden throne with lion-clawed legs or embracing the latest troupe of incoming Arab dignitaries at the airport, Desta conveys the Emperor’s aristocratic bearing and presence. These opaque yet intimate portraits illuminate the mechanisms involved in his elevation to divine status by the Rastafari. The regal lions that communicate the godly authority of the Ethiopian throne are also a constant feature.

Remarkably, when Selassie was deposed by the military coup led by the Derg, a committee of officers who would go on to rule as a communist military junta, Desta was able to hold on to his official position. During that phase of his work, the politics of photographing his country’s misfortunes was transformed by the need to document another violent and brutal phase in its history. The postcolonial fragility of Ethiopian social life was compounded by famine and by policies of relocation pursued as part of a counter-insurgency campaign aimed at rebels and regional movements for self-determination. Once again, the country’s strategic location and internal divisions made it the focus of geopolitical conflict and external intervention. Formal adherence to socialist ideology proved no obstacle to selfishness, corruption, stupidity and error. Once again, Ethiopia was at the centre of global attention. This time, it was an object of charity, something which provided unwelcome proof of the Victorian racial rules that made democracy, stability, prosperity and honest government into the exclusive property of Europe and its offshoots.

Desta’s official duties were counterpointed by a risky and clandestine survey of the atrocities carried out by the successor government. This period of conflict is known as the Red Terror. It is not sensationalized or over-represented in this selection of Desta’s work. The idea that terror, trauma and mass death create problems of representation is an old modern issue to which different groups of artists, known and unknown, inside and outside the galleries, have offered a range of responses. That discussion of ethics and genocide arises on one edge of Desta’s photographic practice. However, the core problem articulated in the later stages of his African work is somewhat different. Perhaps the sufferings and conflicts of Ethiopian history have now become so routinized, so familiar that they cannot be shown here without selling them short.

Years before, Selassie had fled the Italian takeover of his country to seek safety in English exile. He lived for some years in Bath and in Malvern. Now it was Desta’s turn to flee. He took a refugee’s difficult path to inner London where a new Ethiopian diaspora was contributing fresh chapters to England’s long relationship with Africa and, in the process, creating another black community quite different from the one forged by the postwar migration of Caribbean settlers. Desta’s archive is of world historic significance and we are fortunate indeed to be able to enjoy this small taste of the riches that it holds.