The first Chinese New Year (this year is the Year of the Water Rabbit) is celebrated in Port Louis, British Mauritius at the Cohan Tai Biou Pagoda. What will become the oldest pagoda in the Southern Hemisphere has been built this past year, and is the religious and political centre for the island’s Chinese community.
The Brazzaville Conference is opened by World War II Free French Leader Charles de Gaul, in French Equatorial Guinea (Republic of Congo). The meeting is the first step toward French decolonisation of Africa. To obtain the allegiance and assistance of Africans in France’s African colonies during the war, De Gaul agrees to end forced labor, the end of legal restrictions applied to Africans but not to whites, the creation of national assemblies elected by Africans, and the inclusion of representatives of black Africans into the French Assembly in Paris. However, De Gaul rejects any talk for now of national independence.
Members of Côte d’Ivoire independence party founded by Félix Houphouët-Boigny (pic), Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, clash with French colonial police, who kill 13 people. This month and February 50 people will die in political violence. Tomorrow (31 January), French government troops arrive in Abidjan.
A South African High Court Judge rules there is sufficient evidence to charge Nelson Mandela and 94 other anti-apartheid activists with High Treason, a capital offense. The defendants all plead not guilty, and are released on bail, although their request for a jury trial is denied.
The Day after the Arusha Declaration outlines Tanzania President Julius Nyerere’s socialist policies, government nationalises all banks in the country. In the next week, insurance companies and other businesses will be nationalised. However, civil servants will prove incapable of running these firms, and foreign companies are eventually hired to administer them.
The U.N. Security Council votes that South Africa’s administration of South West Africa is illegal. South Africa was given administrative control over the former German colony by the League Nations in 1922. When the League was replaced by the U.N. in 1945, all League mandates were turned into U.N. Trusteeships. However, South Africa refused to yield control, ignored a 1949 ruling from the International Court of Justice that it do so, and is now running the territory as a white supremacist apartheid state. The U.N. decides that for the first time in its history, the U.N. itself rather than a member state will administer a territory, which the Security Council announces is now to be known by the name Namibia. Defiant, South Africa remains in the country.
Africa’s air industry begins the new millennium with tragedy as only 10 survive a crash of an Air Kenya flight shortly after takeoff from Félix-Houphouët-Boigny Airport in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. 179 people are aboard.
The chairmanship of the African Union is given to Equatorial Guinea’s dictator Teordoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. The choice is criticised for undermining the organization’s commitment to democracy.
The first conference is held by Puntland’s Horseed party. This is the political party of President Abdirahman Farole, who runs the country as an autonomous state within the Somalia Federation. Party representatives are told that they were the ones who created a democratic state in the region and should be rewarded by voters in upcoming local elections.
South African acapella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo wins its fifth Grammy Award. The singers are awarded Best Global Album, for Shaka Zulu Revisited.
Considered Angola’s most exciting sculptor since independence, Jone Ferriera, who is only 30, is the subject of a one-man exhibition that opens today at Luanda’s Hotel Epic Sana. Using only scrap metal (reworked also to make his signature military-style jacket), he sculpts a vision of contemporary Angola that is both personal and political.
Prime Minister of Madagascar (1864-1895), in Ilafy, Madagascar. Born on an unlucky day, by custom he was supposed to be abandoned in the wilderness to die, rather than bring bad luck to his household. However, his father Rainiharo, Madagascar’s Prime Minister from from 1833 to 1852, cut off two of his infant son’s fingers instead, to dispel the curse. Rainilaiarivony's own life seemed cursed when several of his 16 children came to a bad end, and he died in exile in Algiers shortly after he was deposed during the French invasion of Madagascar. As Commander-in-Chief of the army, he put down several rebellions, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, while his simultaneous role as head of government made him fabulously rich, with 57 homes and 1,000 slaves.
South Africa medical scientist, in Pretoria, South African Republic. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1951, he became the first African-born Nobel Prize winner. His prize was in recognition for his development in 1937 of a vaccine against Yellow Fever.
Malawian lawyer and government official, in Nyasaland. “The Father of Malawi” (pic, left) he was instrumental in achieving Independence for Malawi from Great Britain, and served as Malawi’s first Minister of Justice and first Attorney General. A political argument in 1980 with Malawi’s autocratic ruler Hastings Banda led to his exile. While abroad, he and his wife were kidnapped, convicted of treason in a Malawian kangaroo court, and became political prisoner. After eleven years held captive, he died a blind prisoner because the Banda regime refused him medical treatment.
South African hairstyling entrepreneur, in Eldorado Park, South Africa. He left a banking career to resume his boyhood passion for cutting hair, and by 2022 as CEO of Legends Barbershop had opened 70 men’s haircutting salons in South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho and Namibia, winning the Africa’s Best Barbershop Award in 2018.
