Haley’s Comet is visible in African skies.

The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is founded in London. Its mission is not to end slavery throughout the world but to end Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, and stop the practice of slavery on British lands. The society’s most effective tool will be public relations, earning public sympathy by using human stories of the cruelty and horror that enslaved Africans endure as their lives are taken from them.

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The traveler’s book Guide for Southern Africa quotes the fare from Salisbury (Harare), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to the town of Tuli on a Zeederberg Coach at £15 (equal to £2,466 in 2022). The trip takes 14 days to travel 487 km.

What is normally peak harvest season in Ruanda-Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) sees widespread famine in the Bugoyi region. The World War I fighting between Belgium and Germany in the colony, which was named German East Africa until the Belgian victory there, interfered with planting. Poor rainfall has worsened crop growing. Preoccupied with its war and not ready to start administrating its new colony, Belgium provides no assistance as thousands starve.

South African General Jan Smuts, who will become Minister of Native Affairs in 1919 before his terms as Prime Minister, reveals the white minority government’s long-term plans for national racial segregation that will begin under his administration and be fully realised with apartheid. He refers to South Africa’s black majority as “our native problem: “In land ownership, settlement and forms of government, we are trying to keep them apart, and in that way laying down a policy which may take a hundred years to work out, but which in the end may be the solutions of our native problem"

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With post-World War I travel in East Africa made easier by sea and rail links, safaris are traveling out into the savannah with a record number of tourists and hunters. The reason for growth is the automobile, now used instead of the human porters. Auto safaris rely on resupply stations equipped with gas, food and necessities located along the safari routes.

Continuing its attacks against the new state of Israel, the Royal Egyptian Air Force strikes the British Royal Air Force’s air base near Haifa, claiming they mistook it for the Israeli Air Force base at Megiddo Airport.

In an effort to establish himself as a virtual dictator by the time Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) will obtain national independence in 1960, Maurice Yaméogo is given “special powers” by parliament, which his party controls. He will use these powers to suppress political opposition and create a one-party state.

The Lake Chad Convention establishing the use of the Central African lake is signed by Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Nevertheless, the lake will shrink in size by 90% by the 2010s (pic: right) due to climate change, a rising human population competing for its resources and unplanned irrigation.

Mozambique’s future president Samora Machel becomes President of the independence party Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Liberation Front of Mozambique), or Frelimo.

Because of the mining of roads and railway tracks by insurgents fighting the white minority government of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), specially-designed railway cars are put into service and white farmers and residents purchase armour-plating for their Land Rovers as protection against landmines.

South African President Thabo Mbeki undertakes an official State Visit to the U.S. He meets with U.S. President Bill Clinton in Washington.