Green Point Lighthouse, which will become South Africa’s oldest lighthouse, begins operations, at Mouille Point near Cape Town.

Great Britain annexes the Afrikaner territory of Transvaal, in a plan to unify the entire African sub-continent under British rule. The annexation further antagonises the Afrikaner community after decades of feeling suppressed under British rule, and ultimately leads to the first Anglo-Boer War.

A military train collides with a goods train near Potchefstroom in Transvaal Republic, South Africa. Among the dead are 16 soldiers and officers of the Eighth New Zealand Contingent, in the country to fight with the British during the Second Anglo-Boer War. During the conflict, 71 New Zealand soldiers will be killed.

The East African Professional Hunters Association is founded in Nairobi, British Kenya, by the era’s most famous hunters – including Sydney Downey, Donald Ker, Philip Percival and Harry Selby. Its goal is to introduce conservation measures and preserve wildlife threatened by overhunting. East Africa acquires the world’s strictest hunting laws thanks to the association, including a ban on killing female and infant animals, and any killing at watering holes or at night or from a moving car.

The South African Open tennis tournament concludes without the participation of the World’s #1-ranked tennis player, Arthur Ashe from the U.S. South Africa’s apartheid government refuses to grant Ashe a visa because he is black.

Swaziland’s King Sobhuza becomes an absolute monarch when he overturns the 1968 Independence Constitution, bans political parties and assumes all governing powers.

Liberian President William Tolbert (pic: bound on right and facing his assassin Samuel Doe) and much of his cabinet and several government officials are executed in a military coup d’état led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe (pic, holding gun). In the years ahead, oppression, corruption, a rigged election and a failed 1985 counter-coup that leads to ethnic cleansing will all occur before Charles Taylor mounts an insurgency to topple Doe’s junta in 1989.

Guinea and Liberia send troops to Sierra Leone to assist with a counter-insurgency against Liberian rebels invading from Liberia.

On today’s Easter Sunday, the chefs at the Hotel Nairobi InterContinental continue their annual tradition of making the world’s largest chocolate Easter egg, and using dyed sugar paste to paint on it stylish Kenyan scenes.

The first Nuclear Security Summit hosted by the U.S. and held in Washington is attended by Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Gheit, Morocco’s Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan (pic, with U.S. President Barack Obama) and South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. They African leaders have a working dinner with U.S. President Obama.