As Belgium’s King Leopold and Arab slave traders fight over control of mineral-rich Central Africa in the Congo-Arab War (1892-1894), Belgian forces take control of a key river city, Nyangwe, after a six-week siege that destroys the city. Of the city's one-thousand buildings, only one remains standing.
South Africa’s Transvaal University College is founded, with 32 students, 4 professors and 4 lecturers holding classes inside a single house (pic). The institution will grow into the multi-racial University of Pretoria, with a 2023 student enrollment of 50,000.
One of apartheid South Africa’s most draconian laws goes into effect: The Public Safety Act allows the Minister of Law and Order, the Commissioner of Police and any magistrate or police officer to detain anyone they consider “a threat to public safety.” Detention without trial is specified for use against dissidents. Thousands of anti-apartheid activists are abducted and hundreds “disappear” under the authority of this act.
The president of the new state of the United Arab Republic, Gamal Nasser, one month after the country was created with a merger of Egypt and Syria, addresses a public assembly in Damascus. He triumphantly waves a cheque from the Saudi Arabian government. He says the cheque was given to the Syrian Interior Minister as a payment to assassinate him. The Saudis did not know that the minister is a Nasser ally.
Central African Republic dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa declares himself President for Life. In 1975, he will crown himself Emperor of the Central African Empire. In 1979, he will be ousted by a military coup d’état.
With the Land Reform Proclamation of March 1975, Ethiopia’s military government nationalises all rural land, abolishes tenancy, and puts peasants in charge of the law’s enforcement. No family may have a plot larger than ten hectares, and no one may employ farm workers.
A coup d’état led by Brigadier Oupa Gqodzo topples the government of South Africa’s “independent country” Ciskei, an invention of South Africa’s apartheid regime that never received international recognition and now shows itself as politically unstable.
Urged by Idriss Déby, Chad’s president and chairman of the African Union, to end conflicts in Africa “by diplomacy or by force,” member states agreed to expand the A.U.’s Multinational Joint Task Force to 10,000 troops. This army will present a credible deterrent to conflicts.
The founder of modern Egypt, in Kavala, Greece. At the height of his rule from 1805 to 1848 he controlled Lower and Upper Egypt, Sudan, parts of Arabia and all of the Levant.
South African architect, in Nylstroom, Republic of Transvaal. Imprisoned at age 10 in a concentration camp where Britain imprisoned Afrikaner and black people during the Second Anglo-Boer War, he managed an education, and was awarded his first architectural commission, for a church, at age 23. He designed 80 churches, preferring to work in stone, as well hospitals, city halls and banks throughout South Africa. His major commissions included South Africa's Reserve Bank Building in Bloemfontein, the Libertas Building in Pretoria, and the Merensky Library at the University of Pretoria. He is most famous for his formidable Voortrekker Monument.
Malagasy poet who is widely regarded as Africa’s first modern poet and Madagascar’s greatest literary figure, in Ambatofotsy (Antananarivo), Madagascar. As a poor child, he taught himself to read and write, driven by a passion for literature. He composed poems in the modernist style, and starting in 1931, in the surrealist genre. Personal and professional crises and a snubbing by French colonial authorities led to his suicide at age 36, just as the first generation of mainland African poets were recognising and paying homage to his genius. At Independence in 1960, Madagascar’s government proclaimed him the National Poet.
South African singer and anti-apartheid activist who was Africa’s first international entertainment star, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Exiled from South Africa after her 1963 speech at the U.N. denouncing apartheid, she was embraced by the world as a Pan-African icon known as "Mama Africa."
