Zera Yacob Amha Selassie
Head of the House of Solomon
Zera Yacob Amha Selassie (; Geʽez: ዘርዐ ያዕቆብ አምሃ ሥላሴ; born 17 August 1953) is the grandson of Emperor Haile Selassie and son of Amha Selassie of the Ethiopian Empire. He has been head of the Imperial House of Ethiopia since 17 February 1997 as recognized by the Crown Council of Ethiopia.
He was designated as "acting crown prince" and heir presumptive in 1974 by the Emperor Haile Selassie I close to the end of his reign; however, the Empire was overthrown in the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution by the Derg. As a result, Yacob never became a ruling Emperor of Ethiopia. Ethiopia became a Federal Democratic Republic in 1991.
Biography
Zera Yacob attended Eton College and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford and Sandhurst. He was named Acting Crown Prince and heir presumptive to the Imperial throne of Ethiopia in 1974 by his grandfather, Emperor Haile Selassie, following his father's stroke a year earlier.
After the fall of the Ethiopian monarchy, Zera Yacob completed his studies at Oxford in the 1970s and worked briefly as a banker in the United States. He then moved to London and was married to Princess Nunu (née Getaneh), and later divorced. They had one daughter, Princess Lideta Zera Yacob.
The public source identifies “Zera Yacob Amha Selassie” as head of the House of Solomon. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Zera, Yacob and Amha.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zera Yacob Amha Selassie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.