EMPEROR MENELIK

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8612, 24 December 1913, Page 5

EMPEROR MENELIK

DEATH OFFICIA LLT ANNOUNCED 6r Telegraph—Pr«j Association—Copyright LONDON, December 22. It is officially announced from Adis Aboba that King Menelik, of Abyssinia, is dead. Menelik 11,, or Sahala Mariem, Emperor of Abyssinia, was a eon of Haeli Molicoth, King of Shoa, was born in 1842, and claimed to be a direct descendant of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. Ho was elected king in 1 November, 1889. He had married in 1883 Taitu, a princess of Tigro, a lady who had been married four times previously, and who exercised considerable influence. In 1889 and subsequent years, Menelik sent forces to co-operate with the British troops engaged against the Somali Mullah, Mahommond Abdullah. Menelik had in 1898 crushed a rebellion by Has Mangasha (the natural son of Johannes), and he directed his efforts henceforth to the consolidation of his authority, and in a certain degree to the opening up of his country to western civilisation. He had granted in 1894 a concession for the building of a railway to hia capital from the French port of Jibuti, but alarmed by a claim made by Franco in 1902 to the control of tho line in Abyssinian territory, ho stopped for four years tho extension of tho railway beyond Dire Dawa. When in 1906 Franco Great Britain and Italy came to an agreement on tho subject, Menelik officially reiterated his full sovereign rights over tho whole of hia empire. In May, 1909, the Emperor’s grandson Lij Yasu, then a lad of thirteen, was married to Romanie, granddaughter of tho Negus Johannes. Two days later Yasu was publicly proclaimed at Adis Abeba as Menelik’s successor. At that time the Emperor was seriously ill, and as his ill-health continued, a council of regency—from which the Emperor was excluded—was formed in March, 1910