Afraid of an Inspiring Olympics Story

In 1924, athletes from 44 countries came to France to take part in the 8th Summer Olympics. Paris last hosted the games in 1900, a much smaller event that mainly served as an introduction to what would become a new global sporting tradition. The 1924 games, held not long after the end of the Great War, were framed as a testament to peace and cultural cohesion, even as the event served as codification of the organization’s commitment to segregation and omission. As was the case in 1924, the 2024 Paris Olympic games purport to be a “peoples’ Olympics,” despite continued overt exclusion. A hijab ban remains in place, the carbon footprint will be significant, and thousands of African immigrants living in informal housing have been displaced to build facilities. The paradox of Olympic ideology cemented in 1924 remains in new ways; while it claims to be “for all,” it has always been an institution of exclusion. 

A clear representation of this irony took place at the 1924 Paris Games, when organizers hosted and celebrated the presence of the Ethiopian regent, Ras Tafari Makonnen (later coronated as Emperor Haile Selassie), despite rejecting Ethiopia’s entrance into the Olympic movement and systematically excluding African colonies from participating in sport as nation states. 

Between 1900 and 1924, European sport administrators spent a great deal of time debating the role institutional sport should play in African and Asian colonies. At the first Olympic Games, 14 nations competed — all were European except the United States and Chile (which brought one athlete). By 1924, the IOC invited a few more African and American countries, alongside two African (Egypt and South Africa) and three Asian states, but they were still invested in keeping sporting spaces racially and continentally separate. Inviting more African athletes to compete in Europe’s own competitions was viewed as a dangerous precedent they assiduously avoided, lest empowering Africans athletically bolster them politically as well.

At the time of the 1924 Olympics, Ethiopia was one of a few African countries not under colonial rule. Because it was the only African country to have never been colonized and one of two that remained independent during the Scramble for Africa, it also occupied a special place of symbolic and political exception.  

Tafari came from the same royal blood line as Emperor Menelik II, who ruled from 1889 to 1913, and is often credited for leading Ethiopia out of potential conquest. After the Berlin Conference the Ethiopian Empire recognized Italy’s control over Eritrea in 1889, and Menelik II negotiated with Count Pietro Antonelli of Italy to halt its imperial expansion further into Ethiopia. The treaty, however, had 20 articles written in Amharic and Italian. The document promised starkly different ends in the respective languages. In Article 17 of the Italian version of the treaty, Italy imposed a protectorate of Ethiopia; in the Amharic version Ethiopia claimed the article allowed international diplomacy to be negotiated through Italy only at Ethiopia’s behest. The mistranslation led Menelik II to denounce the treaty in 1893, and Italy retaliated by trying to forcefully impose its rule. At the 1896 Battle of Adwa, regional leaders from around Ethiopia successfully stopped the invasion. 

Following Menelik II’s reign, Lij Iyasu — his 13-year-old grandson — served as the designated emperor for three years. However, Iyasu’s behavior, particularly his interest in Islam, was a concern for the royal family; they deposed the teenager three years later. Then, Menelik II’s daughter, Empress Zewditu took the throne, and brought on Tafari as regent and de facto leader of the empire. Although Ras Tafari Makonnen would not be officially coronated as emperor of Ethiopia until 1930, officially being named Haile Selassie, by 1916 he was the central figure head of Ethiopian political diplomacy. He made significant strides in modernizing Ethiopia’s economy, institutions, and image, and was eager to earn his country more of a stake in international affairs. 

After World War I, the Allied nations formed the League of Nations, hoping to contain political movements inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917. While the 42 initial founding members — including Haiti and Liberia — represented a new type of international organization, unequal forms of membership formed the basis of the League. Article 1 of the League’s charter stipulated that self-governing dominions stuck in the web of European empires could become members, but their status always compromised their diplomatic autonomy. (For example, India was represented by the British raj.) The mandates system in the League postulated that some territories would occupy a position as neither colony nor full state due to their governance structures

Despite some resistance, Selassie remained interested in securing Ethiopia’s entrance into the League to expand Ethiopia’s options in international trade and diplomacy. Member representatives contested Ethiopia’s acceptance into the League due to the practices of slavery within the country. While European empires had systems of colonial labor in Africa akin to slavery, they distinguished between their own racialized systems of brutal exploitation to the institutions of slavery in Ethiopia and Liberia. These explanations were used, as political scientist Adom Getachew has outlined, “not to exclude … but instead to justify their unequal integration.” While Ethiopia was accepted in 1923, Getachew notes it was as a type of “burdened membership.” While not governed by mandates, Ethiopia’s membership was  “a form of inclusion in international society where responsibilities and obligations were onerous and rights and entitlements limited and conditional.”

Ethiopia was thus on the international stage on paper, but it was treated differently than other member nations. Ethiopia and Liberia were required to make additional reports to the League and open their economies to global markets according to leading member nations’ interests. Perhaps the most egregious form of differential treatment came in 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Selassie’s pleas to the League to stop the invasion fell on deaf ears. 

Once in the League Selassie traveled to Europe in the spring of 1924 hoping to negotiate with other members to attain access to the Red Sea. Additionally on this trip he sought a new type of international recognition: a place in the Olympics. 

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator who had helped found the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894, also had big plans in 1924. He saw the 1924 Games as a chance to situate Paris as a major center for sporting innovation — and cement his legacy in sports history. The same year the IOC was founded, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted the Berlin Conference, where European empires met to decide on where they would extend their empires throughout Africa. Coubertin, like these colonial leaders, was driven by a desire to maintain European cultural and territorial domination.   

Coubertin began championing the revival of the Olympic Games a few decades earlier. In his early twenties he studied physical education abroad in England; his course of study convinced him that disciplining individual bodies was an essential prerequisite of projecting imperial might. 

The English taught the young Frenchman about the ideology of Muscular Christianity — a 19th century philosophical movement that that displayed a commitment to Christian manliness, in which bulging muscles were correlated with greater religious purity.

As Coubertin refined his ideas about how organized sport could lead to moral and social strength, he also wanted to promote sport in France for the good of its empire. He was intent on bringing European sport to the African continent to “educate and discipline indigenous people in Africa.” He believed sport would help Africans “adapt … to the instabilities of the new industrial society” and make them more compliant in working toward a vision of modernity laid out by European officials.

While being paraded around the events his athletes were kept from competing in, Selassie discussed the possibility of Ethiopia joining the Olympic movement with Coubertin, with the aim of competing in 1928. Selassie then formally applied to the IOC for Ethiopia’s participation in the next Olympics. He was promptly denied. Newly appointed president of the IOC Henri de Baillet-Latour told him that Ethiopia would have “neither the ability nor facilities to participate in or to host the Olympic Games” — a supposed requirement for new entrants. Statements like these mirrored others made by European ethnologists and sporting officials who visited the continent earlier and declared there were “no real sports” there. Despite the racialized treatment Selassie received in attempting to join both the League of Nations and the Olympic movement, he still thought it better to work within the system rather than from outside of it. He left Paris in 1924 with a commitment to expanding modern sport and Ethiopian recognition globally. 

In 1935, Ethiopia fell to Italian occupation for a few years and Haile Selassie was exiled. He returned in 1941 and continued to develop a modern sporting protocol. In 1948, Selassie helped form the Ethiopian Olympic Committee, however it did not receive recognition until 1954. The IOC only came to accept Ethiopia’s place by negotiating with Onni Niskanen as a representative — a Swedish soldier who moved to Ethiopia for a military mission and became the coach of Abebe Bikila — the first Black African to win an Olympic Gold at the Rome Marathon in 1960 while working for the Ethiopian Imperial Guard. Throughout the 1960s many African countries came to win their independence from colonizers and inspire new cultures of sporting excellence on at the international stage. Though Selassie’s sporting modernization efforts were met with mixed responses, he was delighted to fulfill his ambitions, which he delivered in a speech in 1947 while laying the foundation for the first stadium in Addis Ababa, for “Ethiopia [to] participate in world sports and athletic organizations.”

When Baillet-Latour told Selassie Ethiopia was not institutionally prepared to participate in the Olympic movement, there is far more evidence suggesting that the European committees feared what the country’s athletes could inspire throughout the continent. Before World War I, the IOC thought that an African Games — separate from the Olympic Games but similar in structure — would help serve a civilizing mission. After the war the impetus for such an event became even stronger for German, British, Italian, and French empires. In a 1919 meeting in Lausanne, administrators noted that bringing western sport to Africa and East Asia was the “last battle to join in order to conclude the sporting conquest of the world.” They believed the imposition of an African Games would rectify this gap and further disseminate the ideals of Muscular Christianity. 

The IOC agreed that the first African Games would take place in 1925 in Algeria, and then two years later in Alexandria. Why then, did the first African Games not take place until 1965 in Brazzaville, Congo?

In 1924, the IOC held a session around the Olympic Games to discuss the matter. Several political authorities commented that the African games could inspire “pro-independence agitation” and “anti-colonialist demonstrations.” In other words, the IOC feared that if Africans could come to identify physically and morally as constitutive members of a nation, they might try and revolt against their colonizers. The minutes of the meetings reveal that French, British, and Spanish officials disavowed the idea of an African Games because they feared pro-independence movements. 

A few decades later, as countries around the world gained independence and sought their own sporting recognition, the idea of an African Games was again broached. African Ministers of Youth and Sport staged an African Friendship Games in 1962, independent of the IOC, where 24 independent countries competed. Meanwhile, Indonesia established the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), which sought to disrupt the European control over international sport. 

In correspondences found at the Olympic Archives in 1964, leaders at the IOC directly addressed fears about “GANEFO agents” being “very active on the African continent” and that Africans should “not be influenced by the clever propaganda of another movement.” Instead, the IOC believed they should absorb and support the formation of an African Games, “to control the operation and dictate its instructions for both the present and future,” and allow more nations to take part in the Olympic movement.

 By the 1960s, the IOC realized that including African countries and assisting in a semi-regular African Games would bolster the overall control and ideology of the Olympic movement. The Olympic movement was able to expand and keep control and influence in the hands of mostly European autocrats, similar to its structure today.