Six-year old Al-Ashraf Musa becomes the last of the Ayyubid Dynasty sultans to rule Egypt. It is time for Mamluks to rule. The Mamluks are a group of freed slaves who for generations served Arab rulers in various countries as soldiers and administrators. Now, they want their own country. After the recent death of the Egypt's Ayyubid ruler Sultan As-Salih Ayyub, they installed one of their own, Izz ad-Din Aybak, to rule. However, Aybak realises that the Mamluks are not powerful enough to defeat the armies of the other Ayyubid states of Palestine and Syria, which are now advancing on Egypt to push him out. He steps down, places the Ayyubid royal boy Musa on the throne as his puppet, and will continue to rule from behind the scenes while retaining his role as the Egyptian army’s Commander. In four years, he will determine that any Ayyubid threat has passed. He will send Musa to live with his aunt, assume full power as Sultan, and establish the Mamluk Dynasty that will rule Egypt until 1517 and then administer Egypt for the Ottoman Empire until 1798.

Africa’s first black doctor trained in modern medicine, James S. Smith, becomes Liberia’s sixth president. Immigrating from the U.S. to Liberia at age eight, he apprenticed under Dr. James W. Lugenbeel, the colonial doctor of the American Colonization Society, which was developing Liberia as a country for African-Americans freed from slavery. He returned to the U.S. to finish his training. Called into politics as most Liberian elite did, he served as Senator and Secretary of State before he was elected as Vice President in 1869. Today, with President Edward Roye forced out of office, he becomes president, although his term in office will last only two months.

More of Southern Africa’s interior is open to passenger and cargo travel as a rail line begins service between Mafeking in South Africa’s Transvaal Republic and Bulawayo in Mashonaland (Zimbabwe). It is now possible to travel by rail from Mashonaland all the way to Cape Town.

A modernistic City Hall is dedicated in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Bulawayo is the country’s second largest urban centre, and will obtain city status in 1943. The clock tower, a gift from resident Mrs. E. L. Wynne, includes a set of chimes, which she switches on during the ceremony.

The Vichy France colony of Madagascar, allied with Nazi Germany during World War II, surrenders to British and Allied forces. To secure the island, the South African Air Force flew 401 sorties, with one pilot killed. Seven SAAF aircraft are lost, but only one during combat.

During the Suez Crisis, Israeli Air Force planes strike Egyptian positions at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Israeli troops move in to occupy the area.

Despite an international sports boycott of apartheid South Africa, Mr. Olympia, the world’s top bodybuilding competition, is held in Pretoria, South Africa. The winner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his mentor Ben Weider, the head of the International Federation of Bodybuilding, refuse to participate unless black bodybuilders and a racially-integrated audience are allowed. The competition is the first legally integrated sporting event since the inception of South Africa's apartheid regime nearly 30 years before.

Aliko Dangote founds Dangote Cement, the most profitable company of his Dangote Group that he began in 1981, in Lagos, Nigeria. The company will expand operations into six other African countries.

After peacekeeping efforts by U.N. troops fail in Somalia, the U.N. Security Council votes unanimously to end its mission in the country. Somalia is plunged into years of chaos and lawlessness.

Barack Obama (pic: age 10 with father), whose father Barack Obama Sr. is Kenyan, is elected President of the United States. He becomes the first African-American Chief Executive in the country’s history, and will be re-elected in 2012 to a second term.

The Port Elizabeth regional headquarters of South Africa’s liberation party the African National Congress is named Florence Matomela House, in honour of the first woman to be arrested, in Port Elizabeth, during the landmark 1952 Defiance Campaign against racist apartheid laws.

The Tigray War begins with a surprise attack by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the Northern Command Centre of the Ethiopian Defense Forces, which is aligned with the Eritrean Defense Forces against the secession movement of Ethiopia’s Tigray Region.