King

last king of the kingdom of Jimma in Ethiopia, scholar, was born in Jiren, the political capital and commercial center of southwestern Ethiopia. As a young man Abba Jobir received the best Muslim education under several prominent Muslim scholars who settled in Jimma during the reign of his famous grandfather Abba Jifar II (r. 1878–1932).

His grandfather was the most famous, wealthiest, and most popular Oromo king throughout Ethiopia during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a very foresighted politician who had an excellent grasp of the importance of firearms in warfare. He sent agents to the expanding kingdom of Shewa and realized that King Menilek had superiority in weapons; therefore, he peacefully submitted to Menilek. Although four other Oromo kings who resisted Menilek were destroyed, Abba Jifar II signed a peace treaty with the Christian king of Shewa in 1882 In exchange for local ...

king of Dagombas and victim of murder at Yendi, the capital of the Dagomba traditional area, was born in August 1945 at Saganarigu, a suburb of Tamale in present-day northern Ghana. His father was Andani Yakubu, also the king of Dagbon, who reigned from 1968 to 1969, and his mother was Zenabu Mahama, who hailed from Savelugu. He was named after his grandfather, Na Yakubu I (1824–1849). He was the first son of his father, who had about thirty children, and the only child of his mother. He attended Yendi Primary and Middle schools and taught as a pupil teacher for several years.

He became the Ya-Na, the title given to the king of the Dagombas, in 1974. The previous incumbent, Ya-Na Mahamadu Abdulai IV (1969–1974 was said to have been improperly installed as king The matter was contested in court amid great tension ...

king of Morocco, was born on 9 July 1929 to Mohammed V and Lalla Abla bint Tahar. Mohammed V ensured that his son received an advanced education by sending him to the Imperial College at Rabat and then to France. Hassan received a law degree from the University of Bordeaux.

When French colonial officials received approval from the French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault to remove Mohammed V from the throne of Morocco, Hassan was arrested and imprisoned on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica on 20 August 1953. Mohammed and Hassan were then banished to the French colony of Madagascar in January 1954. They returned to Morocco on 16 November 1955 after the French government in Paris ultimately chose to allow Morocco independence rather than have to fight anticolonial wars in Algeria and Morocco Hassan became a key advisor to his father after Morocco gained its independence ...

king of Libya, Libyan religious and political leader, descendant of a distinguished North African family that traced its ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad, was the first head of state after Libya won independence in 1951. Born at Jaghbub in eastern Libya, Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Mahdi al-Sanusi was the eldest son of Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi, in turn the eldest son and successor to Sayyid Muhammad bin ʿAli al-Sanusi, the founder of the Sanusi Order, a strictly orthodox order of Sufis established in Libya in 1842. Idris was schooled in traditional Islamic studies at the Kufrah Oasis, a Sanusi center in southeastern Libya, where he earned a reputation for piety and scholarship. After Italy invaded Libya in 1911, an occupation the Sanusi Order resisted with force, Idris assumed leadership of the order in 1916 Idris tried to reach a peaceful accommodation with the Italians but when his ...

monarch, was born in the Kasai Province (in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) sometime around 1920. Very few details of his youth and childhood are available. His grandfather, Kalamba Mukenge, had made an alliance with the Belgian officer Van Weisman in the 1880s. In 1934 his father was exiled by the Belgian colonial administration. Kalamba attended mission schools in his youth, but the colonial government appointed him in 1946 as the representative of Lulua ethnic communities in the Lulua and Kasai districts Lulua ethnic identity had emerged in the late nineteenth century as Luba speaking clan member devastated by Cokwe and Swahili speaking slave raiders had fled into western Kasai where they were welcomed by indigenous Luba speakers who became known as Lulua in the colonial period Belgian companies and authorities favored the eastern Luba immigrants now known as Luba to distinguish them from the Lulua while ...

king of the Bangwaketse in Botswana, was born in Thaba Nchu, Lesotho, on 17 August 1933, the eldest son of Kgosi Bathoen II, paramount chief of the Bangwaketse ethnic group, and Mohumagadi Ester Mafane, a princess of the Barolong boo Seleka. Between 1946 and 1949, Seepapitso started his primary education at Rachele Primary School in Kanye, headquarters of GaNgwaketse District. He was later sent to Tiger Kloof Institution in Vryburg, South Africa, to complete his primary education and continue his secondary education. Seepapitso’s parents were staunch believers in education and Congregational Christianity, and Tiger Kloof Institution in Vryburg had been established by the London Missionary Society.

In 1956 the South African apartheid government began regulating education at Tiger Kloof with the introduction of Bantu education As a result Seepapitso left Tiger Kloof for Moeding College a school in Bechuanaland Protectorate now Botswana that was modeled on the ...

king of Morocco, was born Mohammed ben al-Hasan, the crown prince of Morocco, in Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, on 21 August 1963. His father Hassan II was the twenty-first king in the Alaouite Dynasty, which claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad and has reigned in Morocco since 1666.

When Mohammed was four years old, his father enrolled him at the Qurʾanic school of the Royal Palace, where he learned the Qurʾan by heart and received a traditional education. After primary and secondary studies at the Royal College and receiving his baccalaureate in 1981, Mohammed obtained in 1985 a BA in law at the College of Law of the Mohammed V University in Rabat. The subject of his thesis was “The Arab-African Union and the Kingdom of Morocco’s Strategy in the Matters of International Relations.”

In 1987 he obtained his first certificate of higher studies, a CES ...

Born in Mokhotlong, Lesotho, the eldest son of Paramount Chief Seeiso Griffith, Moshoeshoe II was a direct descendent of Moshoeshoe, the nineteenth-century founder of the Basotho nation. He studied politics, philosophy, economics, and law at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. Moshoeshoe II returned home before completing his studies to be throned paramount chief of Basutoland in March 1960. When Basutoland became independent as Lesotho in 1966, he was declared king. After Chief Joseph Leabua Jonathan was elected prime minister in 1965, conflict developed over the extent of the king’s power. In 1967 Moshoeshoe agreed to abide by the constitution, which vested executive authority in the prime minister. In the January 1970 general elections Jonathan recognized his party would be voted out so he nullified the elections and suspended the constitution Moshoeshoe was arrested and then exiled in March After agreeing to avoid political activity Moshoeshoe ...

Ingwenyama (king) of Swaziland, was born on 19 April 1968 to King Sobhuza II and Inkhosikati (queen) Ntombi Tfwala. His name at birth was Makhosetive (king of all nations). His mother lived at Etjeni Royal Residence. He danced Incwala (first fruit) at the age of 2, and four years later he began to perform the traditional sibhaca dance. His sibhaca team competed at many festivals and other events. As a boy, he engaged in traditional agricultural work, during plowing, weeding, and harvesting. He also went to hunt with emabutfo and shot birds with a sling and later with a gun. In 1973, at five years old, he joined the Umbutfo Defence Force, becoming the first young cadet to join the force. Three years later, he attended the Masundvwini Royal School and was noted for his dedication to excellence in his studies.

When his father King Sobhuza II died in ...

The second youngest of at least sixty-seven sons of King Sobhuza II, Makhosetive was only fifteen years old when chosen by his ailing father to succeed him to the throne. According to tradition, he was not to be crowned king until he turned twenty-one, and royal duties would be attended to by a regent, one of Sobhuza’s wives. In 1983 Makhosetive was called away from his studies at Sherborne, England, to quell unrest generated by the removal of Queen Mother Dzeliwe as regent and the installation of Queen Ntombi. Further disputes between royal factions led to his coronation as King Mswati III, in April 1986, three years earlier than expected. In May 1986 Mswati dismissed the Liqoqo, the traditional advisory council to regents, which had assumed greater powers than were customary. In July 1986 he dismissed and charged with treason Prime Minister Prince Bhekimpi and several government officials ...

politician and king, was born on 20 November 1925 in the town of Bunkeya located in the province of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His father was Mwanangwa Mutampuka Munongo, and his mother was Luebo Lwa Nkolomba. Munongo's father died in a colonial prison when his son was relatively young. Munongo's grandfather was the late nineteenth-century warlord M’Siri. Godefroid's uncle Mwami Kitanka was the king of the Yeke people in Katanga, and until the age of eleven Munongo spent most of his time at his uncle's court rather than immediately enrolling in primary school as his other siblings had done. This experience later proved useful once he became the king of the Yeke himself, as he had a great knowledge of court rituals.

Around 1936 Munongo commenced his formal education at the primary school of Bunkeya and he later transferred to Saint Boniface school in Lubumbashi ...

kabaka (king) of Buganda, was born on 13 April 1955 at Mulago Hospital in Kampala. His full name is Ronald Frederick Muwenda Mutebi II. The son of Kabaka Edward Muteesa II and Kabejja Sarah Nalule Kisosonkole, Mutebi was raised amidst the turbulent politics that swirled around Twekobe, the Ganda palace in Mengo, as its leaders attempted to preserve a privileged place for the kingdom in the new nation of Uganda. The British colonial strategy of indirect rule had created a twentieth-century version of Buganda inside of Uganda, in which a small elite with chieftain titles held authority, but took care to act in ways that would please the Protectorate officers and thus maintain the advantages they experienced as chiefs. Buganda’s people, the Baganda, had expressed deep dissatisfaction with the kingdom’s government through large-scale violent protests in 1949 Mutebi s father Edward Muteesa II actually wielded very little power and ...

A heavy-drinking womanizer and a poorly educated monarch, King Mwambutsa, born Mwambutsa Bangiricenge, was described by the Belgian governor of colonial Burundi as leading a “dissolute life.” Many Burundians considered him to be a puppet of the Belgian colonial regime. He began his long reign at the age of two, at the time of his father’s unexpected and mysterious death. While his supporters came to see Mwambutsa as a “just king,” a victim of an unholy alliance between powerful members of his own clan and the colonial administration, other Burundians came to resent Mwambutsa’s unwillingness to enlist Belgian support for their own interclan political struggles. The king played little part in the nationalist movement of the 1950s, but the court retained its popular prestige, and many royal family members became nationalist leaders.

In 1962 Burundi became an independent constitutional monarchy granting the king official control over the military and ...

king (mwami) of Burundi from 1915 to 1966, was born in Nyabiyogi, a royal enclosure situated in the northwest of Muramvya. He was the son of King Mutaga Mbikije, who reigned from 1908 to 1915, and Queen Ngezahayo, a Tutsi of the Banyagisaka clan. His grandfather was King Mwezi Gisabo. Second of the name in Burundian traditions, he was called Mwambutsa IV beginning in the 1930s according to a “long” chronological hypothesis from Rwandan historiography. First educated in familial aristocratic circles, between 1925 and 1929 he received primary education in a school created for him by the Belgians.

His early childhood took place under dramatic conditions. King Mutaga surprised Ngezahayo in an adulterous situation with his half-brother, Prince Bangura, in an enclosure close to Bukeye in 1915 A brawl ensued after which Mutaga and Bangura died The Germans who occupied the country at the ...

king of Burundi (September–November 1966), was the dynastic name borne by Prince Charles Ndizeye, son of King Mwambutsa IV and his second wife, Baramparaye (from the Tutsi clan of Bakundo). At the beginning of the 1960s, he was sent to study in Switzerland.

Following the attempted Hutu military coup d’état in October 1965, King Mwambutsa left permanently for Europe. Faced with this political void, Tutsi politicians supportive of the State secretary of defense, Captain Michel Micombero, decided to bring Charles Ndizeye to power. Ndizeye received many emissaries in Lausanne and finally allowed himself to be convinced to interrupt his studies, although he was only eighteen. In February 1966 he returned to Bujumbura the capital of Burundi where he was welcomed triumphantly as the hope of Burundi He made a tour of the country then left again for Europe to explain the situation to his father He returned on ...

(referred to locally as el rey afroboliviano, el rey negro, or el rey de los negros), was born on 19 February 1942 in Mururata, a town in the Nor Yungas Province of the department of La Paz, Bolivia. He was the son of Aurora Pinedo and Genaro and grandson of Bonifacio Pinedo, his immediate predecessor as hereditary Afro-Bolivian king. Julio Pinedo married Angélica Larrea in 1963. They had no children, but together did raise Pinedo’s nephew Rolando Pinedo, next in line to be crowned king.

Julio Pinedo spent much of his life in Mururata, where he and his wife ran a small store and worked their land. It, like that owned by most locals, is dedicated to the cultivation of traditional-use coca, coffee, and citrus fruits.

According to local oral history the tradition of crowning a black king dates back to the colonial period and to ...

Following the death in 1899 of his father, King Bhunu, Sobhuza II was named heir to the throne when only six months old. Labotsibeni, his grandmother, ruled on his behalf until he was twenty-two. Studying first under a South African tutor, Sobhuza completed secondary education at the National School at Zombodze, which was built by his grandmother so that Sobhuza would not be forced to attend missionary schools. Shortly after his formal induction as ngwenyama in December 1921, Sobhuza petitioned King George V of Great Britain for the return of Swazi lands that had been allocated to British settlers in the 1907 Partitions Proclamation. When diplomatic efforts failed he initiated legal proceedings, which were also unsuccessful. During World War II (1939–1945 he managed to gain some land concessions from the British in exchange for Swazi support for the British war effort When negotiations with the British for ...

King of Swaziland, was born to the reigning Swazi monarch, Bhunu (Ngwane V) and Lomawa Ndwandwe on 22 July 1899. His birth names were Nkhotfotjeni (a small beautifully marked lizard) and Mona (jealousy). A few months after Sobhuza II was born, he was selected as crown prince. He had the privilege of getting a formal education at the Zombodze School that Labotsibeni, Bhunu’s mother and the Queen Regent, had established. Labotsibeni got the best tutors from Natal to tutor the crown prince. In 1916, after Sobhuza II had completed his elementary education, his grandmother adamantly stood against the royal counselors of the time and sent him to South Africa for higher education at Lovedale Missionary Institution.

In 1919 there was pressure for the king to take his position as ruler and he was recalled from Lovedale He subsequently got his public ritualization and private preparation for his ...

Bunyoro monarch (r. 1924–1967), was born to Mukama Kabarega, former Bunyoro king, and Elizabeth Kasemira. Winyi lived most of his early life in exile, being brought up in Ankole during Bunyoro’s prolonged wars of colonial conquest and then educated at Mengo High School and King’s College Budo, Uganda’s elite Anglican schools, both located in Buganda. In 1910 he was sent to the Seychelles to serve as private secretary to his exiled father, returning in 1920 to take up a position in Bunyoro’s chiefly administration.

Winyi’s older brother, Andereya Duhaga, king of Bunyoro since 1902, died in 1924 without male issue The best educated and most experienced of the princely candidates Winyi was chosen to succeed him Uganda s colonial governor used Winyi s accession to the throne as an opportunity to formally announce that Bunyoro s secondary status as a conquered territory would now be forgotten Winyi quickly ...