As they do every day, the Mbalantu women of what will be southern Angola/northern Namibia are fashioning their hair into ankle-length braids (pic: circa 1900). Their elaborate hairstyles, and indeed the intricate hair fashions of men and women throughout Africa, astonishes and confounds the first European explorers.
Although Poland and Lithuania will never become major colonial powers in Africa, their vassal state the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia today appoints a Dutch governor of a settlement they wish to establish on the Gambia River on St. Andrews Island (Kunta Kinteh Island). The fort and settlement that will be built are helpless without a water supply that is provided by the king of the local Barra people on condition that no Barra people are sold into slavery. The enterprise will fail, and the settlement will be sold to the Dutch West India Company.
The Nile’s flood waters that began to surge in June recede along Egypt’s Nile Delta, continuing a cycle that civlisation depends upon. The waters leave behind rich deposits of silt and a green landscape. The planting of crops now begins.
Engineers in British Uganda dynamite the natural drainage system for Lake Victoria, which was eroding and threatening a catastrophic drainage of the lake. An artificial system (pic) is built to control the lake’s water level.
Léopold Sédar Senghor (pic: in car left) begins his administration as Senegal’s first president.
Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa and regarded as the Father of Apartheid, is assassinated in South Africa’s parliament. A white Greek-Mozambican militant, Dimitri Tsafendas, stabs him five times. The assassin is arrested, and will be tortured by police. Verwoerd will be considered a martyr by many white South Africans, and 250,000 will attended his state funeral.
Swaziland (Eswatini) achieves national independence, from Britain. The capital is Mbabane but the seat of governing power is the residence of King Sobhuza (pic) at Lobamba. The national population is 406,508.
A ceasefire is reached ending the Western Sahara War between the Polisario Front, representing the people of Western Sahara, and Morocco, which claims the territory of Western Sahara. Up to 20,000 people have been killed in the conflict that began in 1975 and now ends in a military stalemate.
A national census in Namibia shows the country has the lowest population density of any country in the world, with 3.08 people per km2.
Robert Mugabe, who ran Zimbabwe as Prime Minister and President from the country’s founding in 1980 until he was deposed by the army in 2018, dies in Singapore.
First President in Togo, in Kpandu, Togoland. A leader in the independence movement and winner of Togo’s first elections, in 1961, he tried to reduce Togo’s economic and military dependency on France. He was assassinated in a 1963 military coup d’état.
Nigerian military leader, in Ago-Iwoye, Western Region, British Nigeria. When a bloody 1966 coup d’état killed Nigeria’s military leader Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi, Brigadier Ogundipe, as his second-in-command (in effect Nigeria’s Vice President), was in the position to lead the country. Instead, he put aside ambition and glory and left Nigeria, saying a Christian from the South could not control the rebellious Northern army factions. His decision likely spared Nigeria even more trauma and possible civil war in the years that followed.
