On the run, Chief Sandile is killed by Fingos; the Black Hand strikes; Bonus Army want their money; the world’s best-selling single; and man who overcame the odds to become top surgeon’s right hand, dies.
1887 Xhosa Chief Sandile Mgolombane kaNgqika is killed in Denge Forest in a skirmish with the Fingos under Captain J Lonsdale. A son from the Great House of Ngqika, Sandile was defeated during the Seventh Frontier War (1846-47) and his territory was put under British command. But his dissatisfaction with the appointment of British commissioners to rule the territory leads to the Eighth Frontier War (1850-53). Sandile was then deposed and a white man, Charles Brownlee, was appointed in his place as paramount chief. In 1878 Sandile, joined by Kreli of the Galekas, wages war against colonial forces, which include Fingos, at the Battle of Kentani. He loses and flees to Denge, where he meets his death.
1903 In a coup, Alexander I, King of Serbia, and Queen Draga, are assassinated in Belgrade by the Black Hand organisation.
1914 The RMS Empress of Ireland sinks in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, killing 1 012.
1919 Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that when light passes a large body, gravity will bend the rays, is confirmed by Arthur Eddington’s expedition to photograph a solar eclipse off West Africa.
1932 The Bonus Army, of World War I veterans, begins to assemble in Washington, DC to demand their promised bonuses.
1942 Bing Crosby records White Christmas, the world’s best-selling single (100 million copies sold).
2005 Hamilton Naki, a former gardener who despite not having any formal training, became a laboratory assistant and served alongside cardiac surgeon Christian Barnard, dies.
2019 The world’s smallest surviving baby – a girl – is discharged from a hospital in San Diego after being born at 23 weeks weighing a mere 8.6 ounces (245 grams).
2022 Disguised as an elderly disabled woman, a man throws cake at a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which hangs in the Louvre museum, in Paris. The oil painting, described as ‘the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world’, is undamaged. The 36-year-old man was detained and sent to a psychiatric unit.