Significant and interesting moments in time with a South African angle, from this day in history
1900 The start of the only Olympic cricket match, in Paris, France.
1930 The Afrikaanse Taal en Kultuurvereniging (ATKV), cultural organisation, the aim of which was to promote Afrikaans and the well-being of its members, is established in Cape Town as an organisation for railway employees.
1940 Italian troops force the British to withdraw from Somaliland.
1942 In what was supposed to be, in the words of the commanding officer, ‘a piece of cake’, more than 4 000 Canadian and British soldiers are killed, wounded or captured in a raid on Dieppe, in German-occupied France.
1944 The SA 6th Division liberates Florence, Italy.
1944 Invading Japanese troops are driven out of India.
1970 The Chinese Community in South Africa is granted ‘white’ status. They thought it would allow them into white theatres, restaurants and residential areas, but it was only for sporting and leisure purposes.
1981 US F-14 fighter jets intercept and shoot down two Libyan Su-22 fighters over the Mediterranean.
1998 TRC chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu releases documents revealing an alleged plot by Western countries to assassinate UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Whether true or not, Hammarskjöld and 15 others die when their plane crashes in Zambia in 1961. Inquiries into the crash have been stymied by the refusal of the US, Britain, and South Africa to fully co-operate with UN investigators. Descendants of the victims’ believe the plane was brought by a mercenary group hired by a Belgian mining company supporting a secessionist rebellion in Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga state. Hammarskjöld was on his way to mediate when he was killed.
2014 Satellite photos show that the eastern basin of the vast Aral Sea has for the first time completely dried up (creating the Aralkum Desert). The sea, once the world’s fourth-biggest lake, had been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects.
2018 Monsoon rains ease in Kerala State, India, with flooding taking 350 lives.
2020 Apple becomes the 1st US company to be valued at a whopping $2 trillion, just 2 years after it was valued at $1 trillion.