Xhosa King Sandile
Image: Supplied
1660 On his 30th birthday Charles II returns to London from exile in the Netherlands to claim the English throne after the Puritan Commonwealth comes to an end.
1887 Xhosa Chief Sandile Mgolombane kaNgqika is killed in Denge Forest in a skirmish with the Fingos under Captain J Lonsdale. A son from the Great House of Ngqika, Sandile was defeated during the Seventh Frontier War (1846-47) and his territory was put under British command and called British Kaffraria. But his dissatisfaction with the appointment of British commissioners to rule the territory led to the Eighth Frontier War (1850-53). Sandile was then deposed and a white man, Charles Brownlee, was appointed in his place as paramount chief. In 1878 Sandile, joined by Kreli of the Galekas, waged war against colonial forces, which included Fingos, at the Battle of Kentani in an attempt to regain his position. He lost and fled to Denge, where he meets his death.
1903 In a coup, Alexander I, King of Serbia, and Queen Draga, are assassinated in Belgrade by the Black Hand organisation.
1914 The RMS Empress of Ireland sinks in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, killing 1 012 lives.
1919 Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that when light passes a large body, gravity will bend the rays, is confirmed by Arthur Eddington’s expedition to photograph a solar eclipse off West Africa.
1932 The Bonus Army, of World War I veterans, begins to assemble in Washington, DC to request their promised bonuses.
1935 The first flight of the highly advanced German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter.
1942 Bing Crosby records White Christmas, the world’s best-selling single (100 million copies sold). In second place is Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, followed by Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime, and Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley & His Comets.
2005 Hamilton Naki, a former gardener who became a laboratory assistant without any formal training and served alongside cardiac surgeon Christian Barnard, dies.
2019 The world’s smallest surviving baby – a girl – is discharged from hospital in San Diego after being born at 23 weeks weighing a mere 8.6 ounces (245 grams).
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