Cleopatra, Queen of ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic Kingdom, dies at age 39, committing suicide by taking poison. A later myth will say she put a poisonous asp snake to her breast and died from its bite.

A massive island thus far unknown to Europe is sighted by Portuguese captain Diogo Dias after his ship, sailing on its own after separation from the Portuguese fleet, encounters Madagascar. (pic: 1502 map)

Algeria is struck by the worst locust infestation of any year of the locust plague that began in 1864 and will not end until 1875. Drought and a severe earthquake on 2 January worsen the humanitarian crisis that has resulted in famine in Algeria’s interior. Farmers dig trenches and put up screens in an attempt to protect their crops against invading locusts (pic).

The General Election in British Mauritius is a triumph for social activist Basdeo Bissoondoyal and the non-political Jan Andolan Movement’s work to educate the working poor. The country’s new constitution requires a literacy test to be passed for a Mauritian to vote. A mass education campaign has increased the number of eligible voters to 72,000 from 11,445 in 1947. The old oligarchy that has run Mauritius for centuries loses its power as its candidates are voted out. (pic: Port Louis Town Hall)

South Africa’s apartheid government, after segregating housing and forcing poor blacks to find shelter in massive slum-like informal settlements, is on its third day of evicting 26,000 people from one squatter settlement outside Cape Town. Today, a large, non-violent protest is mounted against the evictions, joined by 100 white South African sympathisers.

The end of the Cold War liberates Eastern Europe countries from domination by the Soviet Union, and also ends South Africa's strategic value to the West. For 42 years, South Africa’s apartheid regime has earned Western support by promising to hold back a communist takeover of Southern Africa. As the process of ending apartheid gets underway, the former Communist country Hungary establishes trade ties today with South Africa. (pic: Hungarian embassy in Pretoria)

Protesting the presidency of Didier Ratsiraka, 400,000 Malagasy march on the Presidential Palace in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Ratsiraka orders the Presidential Guard to open fire. An unknown number of people are killed. Political pressure mounts on Ratsiraka, and a Provisional Government will be put in place in October.

Mozambique was suspended by the International Monetary Fund from receiving loans and had international aid terminated by several donors in 2016 after government secretly borrowed US$2 billion from Switzerland’s Credit Suisse Bank. The money was intended for a secret army that was to exist solely under former president President Armando Guebuza's authority. Today, 20 participants in this and other illicit activities are arrested, including Guebuza's son.

The Rwanda Space agency is established, tasked with the development of data-collection satellites that will be used for agricultural planning and natural disaster mitigation. Rwanda launched its first Satellite in November, 2019.

The ocean and beaches of tourism-dependent Mauritius are polluted as an oil tanker that wandered into the country’s waters and got wrecked on rocks spills 4,000 tonnes of oil and 200 tonnes of diesel, endangering the unique marine ecosystem. Villagers fight to protect their coast.

South Africa grants the world's first patent to a non-human inventor. A method to make food containers that can be grasped and stacked by robots was conceived by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, DUBAS, which thinks independently, without human programming.