Hannibal Barca, leader of the army of Carthage (Tunisia) meets with Roman General Scipio Africanus to seek terms ending the Second Punic War. Negotiations fail, and Hannibal will attack the Romans with infantry mounted on North African elephants. The Romans will be intimidated, but learn that trumpet blasts confuse the elephants. Hannibal will be defeated after a difficult Battle of Zama. Scipio will not destroy Carthage, as is customary, but will allow the city to remain, with Hannibal as a civic leader.

Zanzibar, which has been a colony of Oman since 1698, becomes its own sovereign nation with the death today of Said bin Sultan, ruler of Oman and Zanzibar. His one son assumes control of Oman, while another son, Majid bin Said, became the first Sultan of Zanzibar.

Koitalel Arap Samoei, leader of the Nandi people of East Africa, is assassinated by a British intelligence agent. Samoei has forcefully protested Britain’s colonial invasion of his lands by sabotaging construction of the Ugandan railway. The British lure him to a “peace meeting,” and when he arrives today at 11 a.m. and extends his hand to a British agent, he is shot at point-blank range. The Nandi Resistance will dissolve without its leader. The agent is decorated by the British government for this and other murderous tricks he has carried out elsewhere.

South African prosecutors have difficulty making their case for treason against Nelson Mandela and 152 other anti-apartheid activists (there will eventually be 156 accused). The trial unfolds as, outside the Johannesburg court at Drill Hall, 5,000 black South Africans loudly sing the black national anthem Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika.

In Rwanda, the Hutu people form a political party the Parti du Mouvement de l’Émanciapation Hutu. The Tutsi party Union Nationale Rwandaise and Tutsi chiefs that supervise local elections will immediately clash with more militant members of the new Hutu party. Decades old, Hutu vs. Tutsi tensions will continue, ultimately leading to genocide in 1994

On a flight from Lusaka, Zambia to Maputo, Mozambique, Mozambique President Samora Machel is killed along with 34 other people when his presidential plane crashes into the Lebombo Mountains just inside South Africa at a spot where the South African, Mozambican and Swaziland (Eswatini) borders converge. Because Machel was a critic of South Africa's apartheid government, Pretoria's involvement in the crash is popularly suspected.

South Africa’s National Party, which created and executed the apartheid policies of racial segregation and white supremacy, accepts the proposal by President F.W. De Klerk, to open party membership to non-whites. The gesture proves too little, too late. When apartheid ends and democracy is instituted in South Africa in 1994, the National Party will be dissolved.

At the place of honour in the centre of Maputo’s Praça da Independência (Independence Square) before City Hall, a life-size statue of Mozambique’s first president Samora Machel is replaced by a monumental 9-metre statue of him on the 25th anniversary of his death. The statue is the latest to be done for an African country by North Korea’s monument firm the Mansudae Overseas Projects, but is criticized for being a poor likeness of the charismatic leader.

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Kenya agrees to lease a multi-billion US dollar rocket launch facility at Malinda to Italy for five years. The facility dates from the 1960s, when Italy became the third country to venture into space with pioneering ocean launches at that site, and later with a land base (the San Marco Space Center). Both facilities were given to Kenya in a treaty, and are now renamed the Broglio Space Centre. The lease contract commits Italy to award 15 space-study scholarships annually to Kenyan students.