Real events, births and milestones from Africa and the diaspora.
We are adding a source to every entry in this archive. 1 of 5 on this page carry one so far. The rest were written before per-entry citations were recorded, so if you intend to rely on one, check it independently until its source appears here. See our sourcing methodology.
Photo Division, Government of India — Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons 1950 South Africa's apartheid government passed the Group Areas Act, formally segregating cities and towns by race and forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
PoliticsBritain granted Zanzibar internal self-government, a precursor to full independence the following year.
Politics
Mabario — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons 1995 Nelson Mandela presented South Africa's Rugby World Cup-winning captain Francois Pienaar with the Webb Ellis Cup, an iconic moment of post-apartheid reconciliation.
SportsA passenger train carrying more than 1,200 people rolled backwards down the Igandu hill in central Tanzania and struck a goods train, killing 281. It is among the worst rail disasters in African history but not the worst: about 400 people died when an express train left the rails above the Awash ravine in Ethiopia in 1985.
Source: South African History Online
Disaster
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons 1846 Samuel Johnson, the Nigerian Anglican priest whose History of the Yorubas became a foundational text of Yoruba historiography, was born.
Birth