Nationalization and What Remained

The 1974 overthrow of Haile Selassie by the Derg military government struck directly at the legal basis of the Shashamane settlement. The new Marxist administration nationalized land across Ethiopia, including the acreage the deposed emperor had granted to the Ethiopian World Federation, and the settlement's original scope narrowed sharply through the Derg period as settlers lost formal claim to land they had occupied for decades under an authority that no longer existed.

The community did not disappear, and it persisted through the Derg's own fall in 1991 into a legally uncertain but continuous presence that MacLeod's research finds still defines Shashamane today. Ethiopian law has never fully resolved the settlers' land status, so residency at Shashamane exists in a kind of standing limbo, tolerated and in places formalized but never restored to the clean legal footing of the original 1948 grant. What MacLeod's fieldwork adds to the settlers' own well documented account is the host society's side of that limbo, how Ethiopians in and around Shashamane weigh a Rastafari community that identifies as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora against the practical reality that Ethiopian law and Ethiopian neighbors mostly still classify them as foreign immigrants, a gap between self-understanding and legal status that has never been closed.