Police mow down ‘Israelites’; Germany sends the pride of the Royal Navy to the bottom; Israel takes Ethiopia’s Jews; abattoirs close so wild dogs kill children; and black boxer pardoned by Trump Intrepid history maker Robert Mtshali runs his way into the record books by becoming the first black man to complete the Comrades. Picture: IOL Archives
Police mow down ‘Israelites’; Germany sends the pride of the Royal Navy to the bottom; Israel takes Ethiopia’s Jews; abattoirs close so wild dogs kill children; and black boxer pardoned by Trump
1500 Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, the first European to discover the Cape of Good Hope, drowns at sea.
1870 Jan Smuts, one of South Africa’s most accomplished sons and one of Cambridge’s three brightest stars, is born near Malmesbury.
1900 The UK annexes the Orange Free State.
1902 British General Sir Ian Hamilton attends General Smuts’ birthday party and says later: ‘I sat between (General Louis) Botha and (General) de la Ray. On Botha’s right was (General) de Wet, on De la Ray’s left sat Smuts. I had the most enchanting evening, and never wish to eat my dinner in better company.’
1904 Exiled president Paul Kruger settles in a villa in Clarens, by Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
1921 The first Comrades Marathon (87km) is held on Empire Day from Pietermaritzburg to Durban. Its organiser, Vic Clapham, who had been trying for three years to get the race off the ground, wanted a living memorial that would grow and embody the spirit of fortitude, endurance and bravery that typified his fallen comrades World War I. Today the event is the world’s largest and oldest ultramarathon. The first black to complete the gruelling event is Robert Mtshali, albeit unofficially, in 1935. One of the Comrades medals that runners get is named after him.
1921 Police fire on the ‘Israelites’ (a sect led by evangelist Enoch Mgijima) at Bulhoek, near Queenstown; 193 people are killed.
1940 Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.
1941 The German battleship Bismark sinks the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Hood.
1970 The drilling of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the world’s deepest (12 262m) begins in the Soviet Union. (Microscopic plankton fossils are found 6km down.)
1991 Israel conducts Operation Solomon, evacuating 14 325 Ethiopian Jews to their new home in Israel.
2018 Starving wild dogs kill 14 children in Khairabad, India, after the closure of abattoirs.
2018 US President Donald Trump posthumously pardons boxer Jack Johnson for a racially-orientated criminal conviction – transporting a white woman across state lines. Nicknamed the ‘Galveston Giant’, Johnson was the first black world heavyweight champion and one of the most influential boxers in history. His 1910 fight against James Jeffries was dubbed the’ fight of the century’, but led to race riots across the US when Johnson won.
2020 The New York Times’ front page is covered, top to bottom, with the names of 1 000 names of people who haf died from Covid-19 as the death toll in the US nears 100 000.