Returning from Calcutta on his historic first voyage from Europe to India, Vasco da Gama arrives at Malindi (Kenya) with half his crew dead and many survivors ill with scurvy. He burns one of his fleet’s three ships, and places the remaining crew on the other two for the remainder of the voyage to Portugal.
One of Africa’s first Independent newspapers and the first independent newspaper to be published in South Africa, the South African Commercial Advertiser appears with its first edition today in Cape Town. The governors of Britain’s Cape Colony oppose non-government media, and will twice shut down the Advertiser, from May until August 1825 and from 1827 to 1828. However, the newspaper will continue to publication until 1879.
Having successfully passed her licensing exams, South Africa’s Cecilia Makiwane is registered as the first black professional nurse in her country. (pic: stamp from the 1980s when her birthplace in Limpopo, South Africa was the short-lived apartheid "bantustand" Ciskei)
Belgian colonial authorities in Ruanda-Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) make identity cards mandatory for Africans. The Belgians favour and back Umwami (King) Mutara III (pic) of the Tutsi as King over all Rwandans, and they put the Tutsi people in positions of authority. The ID cards make it impossible for Hutu and Twa peoples to pass as Tutsi. The lack of opportunity faced by the Hutu and Twa creates social tension that will fester for decades, and ultimately lead to civil war and genocide.
The first Zulu woman radio announcer, Winnie Mahlangu, goes on the air in Durban on the state radio South African Broadcasting Corporation.
The final Nigerian offense of the Nigerian Civil War, now in its third year, against separatist Biafra, is launched with British support. The offensive will take the Biafran town Owerri on 9 January and claim Ili on 11 January.
The Festival Pan-Africain du Cinema et de la Television de Ouagadougou, FESPACO, is made an official government cultural institution in Burkina Faso, where the film festival originated three years ago, in 1969.
Having killed or exiled all educated people in Equatorial Guinea, Macias Nguema continues his reign of terror under a new national motto he invents: "There is no other God than Macias Nguema."
The Baga Massacres conclude in the villages of Nigeria’s Borno State. For four days, the terrorist group Boko Haram has carried out mass killings. Up to 2,000 people are dead in 16 villages. Nigeria’s government seems helpless to stop Boko Haram, which controls 70% of Borno State.
South African Gary Player, widely regarded as one of the greatest golfer in the game’s history, is awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in Washington. When he won the 1965 U.S. Open at age 29, Player became the only non-American to win all four major tournaments in a career.
Oba of Benin, the king of the Edo people, from 1933 until until his death in 1978, in Benin City, British Nigeria. From the start of his reign he pursued two goals: education for all Edo children and the return of the 3,000 Benin Bronzes stolen by Britain in the 1890s.
Ghanaian novelist, in Accra, Ghana. Described as “the most important novelist to come out of Ghana since Ayi Kwei Armah,” his first novel The Clothes of Nakedness, won the 1999 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, while his 2006 novel The Sun by Night won the 2006 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book Africa.
South African runner and winner of two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the Women’s 800 metres, in Pietersburg, South Africa. An intersex woman designated as a female at birth, she was born with elevated testosterone levels, and was compelled to undergo sex testing following her first World Championship in 2009. World Athletics rules were set in 2019 to prevent athletes like Semenya from competing in the female classification unless they take medication to suppress testosterone levels. Semenya fought the ruling in 2021 at the European Court of Human Rights.
