49BC Uttering, alea iacta est (the die is cast) Julius Caesar does the unthinkable and leads his army across the river Rubicon, signalling the start of the Roman civil war. The phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ is an idiom that means ‘passing a point of no return’.
1806 Two British brigades occupy Cape Town after the defeat of General JW Janssens at the Battle of Blaauwberg, at Papendorp (presently Woodstock). It is the second and final surrender of the Cape to the British.
1879 Three columns of British troops enter Zululand, marking the start of the Anglo-Zulu War.
1900 Mafeking siege: Barolong chief Wessel Montshiwa advises his people not to assist the British during the Siege of Mafeking. Lord Frederick Roberts arrives at the Cape, replacing Sir Redvers Buller as commander-in-chief of British forces in South Africa. General Kitchener, his chief-of -staff, accompanies him.
1912 The flying boat, invented by Glenn Curtiss, makes its first flight at Hammondsport, New York.
1920 The Treaty of Versailles takes effect, officially ending World War I. The League of Nations holds its first meeting in London.South African internationalist and future prime minister Jan Smuts plays a key role in establishing and defining the league, and later the United Nations, and the Commonwealth of Nations.
1946 The League of Nations dissolves and is replaced by the United Nations.
1962 Nasa announces plans to build the powerful C-5 rocket launch vehicle, which became known as the Saturn V Moon rocket,and which launched every Apollo Moon mission. It remained the most powerful rocket in the world until the Artemis space programme came along. Artemis Mission 1 last year saw the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launch an unmanned mission around the moon, in preparation for a return to earth’s satellite, and later a trip to Mars. A return to the lunar surface will include the first person of colour and the first woman to visit the moon. (In Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister and a goddess associated with the moon.)
1966 The Tashkent Declaration ends the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965.
1972 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman returns to the newly independent Bangladesh as president after spending more than nine months in prison in Pakistan.
2007 A general strike begins in Guinea in an attempt to get President Lansana Conté to resign.
2013 More than 100 people are killed and 270 others are injured in several bomb blasts in Pakistan.
2015 A traffic accident between an oil tanker and a bus en route to Shikarpur from Karachi, Pakistan, kills at least 62 people. | The Historian