Roman General Pompey the Great, seeking to further his fame and glory, opens his Campus Martius ampitheatre in Rome, where he stages popular venationes (“hunts”). These feature gladiators tracking and killing animals imported from Africa. In one show, 400 leopards are slaughtered. However, the killing of 600 elephants in history’s biggest venatio horrifies the audience, which sympathises with the terrified elephants who cry with emotion as their families are killed, and reach out pleadingly to the spectators with their trunks

The coronation takes place in Madagascar of Queen Ranavolana I, after the death of her young husband King Radama I. She will reign until her death in 1861, resisting European colonialism and seeking self-sufficiency for her people. However, her policies of forced labour and constant warfare combined with disease will cut in half the Malagasy population during her rule, from 5 million to 2.5 million.

The name Windhoek, the future capital of Namibia, is mentioned in a letter written by Jonker Afrikaner, who founded the settlement there four years ago, in 1840. The name is believed to derive from South Africa’s Winterhoek Mountains where Afrikaner’s family had located.

The large and impressive headquarters for the Kenya and Uganda Railway is opened, in Nairobi. The company runs the port in Mombasa and its rail line inland to Uganda, as well as lake boat service.

In Mauritius, a crime against humanity ends with the release of 1,580 Jewish men, women and children who fled certain death in Nazi-occupied Europe but were intercepted by British authorities and kept behind bars for five years in Mauritius’ Beau Bassin Central Prison.

South African black mine workers of the Witwatersrand strike for higher wages. They seek 10 shillings a day (equal to £26.79 or US$34.04 in 2023). The police state crackdown during the week-long strike is brutal. Officially, nine strikers are killed and 1,248 wounded, although the actual number of casualties is much higher.

Livingstone Airport in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) is opened after a complete rebuilding, at a cost of £1 million (equal to £43.9 million in 2023).

The price for South Africa’s apartheid regime to break the oil boycott of the country and get around sanctions through bribery and use of third parties has cost the government US$2 billion a year from 1980 to 1990, reports Amsterdam’s Shipping Research Bureau.

South Africa’s anti-apartheid and human rights activist Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama, at the White House in Washington.

Illegal fishing by large Chinese ships is destroying fisheries on Africa’s east and west coasts. Tanzania’s crack-down on illegal fishing by Chinese and other foreign vessels has increased the yields of Tanzanian fishermen and boosted fish available for sale on local markets by 67%, and has nearly doubled fish catches for export. 9,272 people involved in illegal fishing have been arrested.