Minasse Haile (1930–2025): Ethiopia’s Scholar-Diplomat Who Bridged Empire and Exile











When Minasse Haile (ምናሴ ኃይሌ) died on September 11, 2025, Ethiopia lost one of the most cosmopolitan figures of its modern history—a man whose life threaded together imperial court politics, Cold War diplomacy, and the quiet rigors of American legal academia. He was ninety-five.

For decades, Minasse embodied an ideal rare in any era: a statesman whose authority was grounded not in force or wealth but in learning. From the dusty highlands of Hararghe Province, where he was born on January 2, 1930, to the lecture halls of New York’s Cardozo School of Law, his story mirrors Ethiopia’s own passage from imperial grandeur through revolution and exile into the complexities of the global age.

Scholar of Two Worlds

The arc of Minasse’s education was remarkable even by the ambitious standards of Ethiopia’s post-war elite. At sixteen he sailed for the United States, enrolling at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1950. Then came a decade of almost relentless scholarship at Columbia University:

Juris Doctor, 1954, Columbia Law School

M.A., 1957, Columbia University

Ph.D., 1961, Columbia University

This blend of legal and political training would later allow him to move seamlessly between drafting domestic regulations and negotiating international peace agreements. Classmates recall a man of quiet precision and disarming humility—a mind equally at home with the abstractions of jurisprudence and the pragmatism of diplomacy.

Building the Institutions of a Modern State

Returning to Ethiopia in the early 1960s, Minasse joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a legal adviser. He quickly left his mark by drafting the country’s first civil service regulations and establishing the Personnel Administrative Agency, which professionalized government hiring and helped stabilize the imperial bureaucracy.

His aptitude caught the attention of Emperor Haile Selassie, who in 1961 named him Chief of Political Affairs in the Emperor’s private cabinet. By 1964, Minasse had become Minister of State for Information, and within two years he was Minister of Information and Tourism—posts that required not just public-relations savvy but a shrewd grasp of how a proudly independent African monarchy could present itself to a rapidly decolonizing world.

Diplomat of the Cold War Era

Minasse’s most visible stage came abroad. In 1968 he was appointed Ambassador to the United States, a post he held until mid-1971. Colleagues in Washington described him as a quiet but formidable envoy who could convey Ethiopia’s interests without bluster, earning respect even among seasoned Cold Warriors.

On 19 August 1971, he succeeded Ketema Yifru as Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, becoming the country’s chief diplomat during a volatile period. His tenure was defined by several key achievements and challenges:

Addis Ababa Agreement (1972): Minasse played a pivotal role in brokering this accord, which ended the First Sudanese Civil War, a landmark in African peacemaking.

Balanced Non-alignment: He continued Ethiopia’s pro-Western but non-aligned stance, carefully maintaining neutrality in the Arab–Israeli conflict—until 1973, when Ethiopia, under intense Arab pressure during the Yom Kippur War, severed diplomatic ties with Israel.

Southern Africa Focus: He followed developments in South Africa, South West Africa (Namibia), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Angola, and Mozambique, supporting African liberation movements while guarding Ethiopia’s own strategic interests.

Minasse was often described as pro-American, but that label barely captures the nuance of a diplomat who understood that Ethiopia’s survival as a sovereign African power depended on balancing superpower rivalries without surrendering independence.

Revolution and Exile

The 1974 overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise of the Derg military junta abruptly ended Minasse’s government career. Facing the perils of the new regime, he chose exile, leaving behind the corridors of power for the quieter, but no less demanding, life of scholarship.

A Second Life in American Academia

In the United States, Minasse joined the Cardozo School of Law in New York, where he taught international law and comparative legal systems. Over the decades he became a beloved figure, eventually honored as Professor Emeritus of Law.

Students remember his lectures as living history lessons: discussions of the law of nations illuminated by stories of tense negotiations in Addis Ababa and Washington. He offered not only the technical mastery of a jurist but the moral perspective of a man who had seen diplomacy at its most fragile.

By 2021, long retired from active teaching, he remained a quiet presence on campus—a bridge between the imperial Ethiopia of his youth and the globally connected Ethiopia of today’s diaspora.

Legacy of a Bridge-Builder

Minasse Haile’s life cannot be reduced to the offices he held or the treaties he helped shape. He stood for something larger: the conviction that law and diplomacy are instruments of national dignity. He brought to every role—from drafter of civil service regulations to foreign minister—the same belief that Ethiopia could engage the world on its own terms, neither colony nor client state.

In death, as in life, Minasse resists easy categorization:

a modernizer who treasured Ethiopia’s sovereignty,

a pro-Western diplomat who advocated African liberation,

a scholar who translated the lessons of politics into the classroom.

His passing is more than the loss of a statesman; it is the quiet closing of a bridge between eras—between Haile Selassie’s empire and today’s Ethiopia, between the hopes of post-war Africa and the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Minasse Haile leaves no monuments of stone, but his legacy endures in the institutions he helped build, the peace he helped broker, and the generations of students and diplomats he inspired. For Ethiopia and for the global community of scholars and practitioners of international law, that legacy will continue to guide the difficult work of marrying principle to power.