The Ethiopian World Federation was established in the United States in 1937. Its aims were to mobilize support for the Ethiopians during the Italian invasion of 1935-41, and to embody the unity of Ethiopians home and abroad. Sections were established in other parts of the Americas. Later, the EWF was given charge of an area of land in Ethiopia for housing returning emigrants. EWF sections in different countries became increasingly identified with the Rastafari movement even though it was originally aimed at everyone ready to defend the Ethiopians subjects and their empire from the fascist aggressors.
History
The EWF built on the efforts of African Americans who, in 1936, sent a delegation consisting of three prominent Harlem figures, all leaders of the black organization known as United Aid for Ethiopia. Reverend William Lloyd Imes, Pastor of the prestigious St. James Presbyterian Church, Philip M. Savory of the Victory Insurance Company and co-owner of the New York Amsterdam News, and Cyril M. Philp, secretary of United Aid, sailed to England in the summer of 1936 to speak with Emperor Haile Selassie concerning financial matters. In response, the Emperor empowered his personal physician Malaku E. Bayen as his special emissary. Bayen at first worked with United Aid for Ethiopia, but the next year he dissolved that body and founded the EWF to take its place. EWF was formally established on August 25, 1937 in New York City as The Ethiopian World Federation, Incorporated. It was originally a not-for-profitmembership organization, incorporated in the State of New York. Later it was also registered by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501 organization, thus conferring tax-exempt status on the organization and its legal subsidiary bodies. The main purpose was set out in the following preamble: The EWF was at first made up primarily of Ethiopian students who came to America to study abroad, after the official coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. It gained support from the Black community of Harlem, and deprecated the term "Negro" in favour of an African and Ethiopian identity. Bayen set up the EWF's newspaper, The Voice of Ethiopia, and led the project of federating the EWF. The first branch of the EWF outside the United States was set up in Kingston, Jamaica, and by 1940 there were EWF chapters in various parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Bayen died in 1940 and was succeeded as leader by Lij Araya Abebe, then in 1943 by Elks Exalted Ruler Finley Wilson, by which time it had become a Black American organization rather than an Ethiopian-led one. As a direct result of the support Ethiopia received from black people in the West, mainly at that time African-Americans, during the Italian invasion of 1935-1941, the Emperor in 1948 granted five Gashas of land near Shashamane to the EWF for Ethiopian people in the Diaspora who desired to return to the motherland. About 22 families moved to Shashamane, most of them Jamaican Rastafarians, most of the land was appropriated by the Derg military government in 1975, though a small number of Rastafarians remain to today. In 1983 the Jamaican branch of the EWF became a political party, the Imperial Ethiopian World Federation, representing the Rastafarian community there.
