| Week starting Monday 10 February |
|
| Date |
Year |
Event
|
|
| 10 |
1904 |
A white paper on the atrocities being carried out by Belgium in the Congo Free State is
presented by the British consul to the Belgian government. |
| 10 |
1980 |
Robert Gabriel Mugabe narrowly misses a second assassination attempt when a bomb explodes
behind his limo. |
| 10 |
1985 |
Nelson Mandela rejects South African president P W Botha's offer of a conditional release. |
|
| 11 |
1900 |
British invasion of the Orange Free State begins when almost 50,000 men and 170 guns cross
the border from Modder River and Graspan to a water-rich farm at Ramdam. |
| 11 |
1935 |
League of Nations debates the border dispute between Italy and Ethiopia, whilst Mussolini
prepares to ship out 35,000 troops to East Africa. |
| 11 |
1977 |
Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam becomes Ethiopia's head of state. Mengistu, head
of the Provisional Armed Forces Committee or Dergue (Shadow) has instigated the "Red Terror"
against competing Marxist groups – killing and torturing students (several children are shot for wearing
school uniforms) and intellectuals. |
| 11 |
1990 |
Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster prison, near Cape Town, after 27 years
incarceration. |
|
| 12 |
1924 |
Howard Carter examines the remains of Tutankhamen when the lid of the sarcophagus is lifted
for the first time in 3,300 years. |
| 12 |
1941 |
Johannes Eugen Rommel arrives in North Africa for the first time, delivered to Tripoli by
Heinkel bomber. |
| 12 |
1949 |
Muslim Brotherhood leader,
Hassan el Banna, is shot to death – probably by the Egyptian government's security branch. |
| 12 |
1953 |
Britain and Egypt sign new treaty. Sudan to have independence within three years. |
| 12 |
1961 |
Congolese leader Patrice Emery Lumumba becomes a Pan-Africanism martyr following his murder
by Moïse Kapenda Tshombe's forces in Elizabethville (now Lumumbashi). |
| 12 |
1979 |
Nationalist guerrillas in Rhodesia shoot down an Air Rhodesia airliner with a missile,
killing 59 people. |
|
| 13 |
1960 |
France tests its first atomic bomb in the Sahara. |
| 13 |
1976 |
General Murtula Ramat Muhammed, Nigerian head of state since a bloodless coup in 1975, is
assassinated during a failed military coup. |
|
| 14 |
1926 |
King Faud is offered $10 million by John D. Rockerfeller for a museum in Egypt. |
| 14 |
1941 |
German 5th Light Division, Rommel's Afrika Corps, arrive at Tripoli. |
|
| 15 |
1935 |
Emperor Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari) announces that Abyssinia wants peace with its
neighbours. (Haile Selassie means "Power of the Trinity.") |
| 15 |
1960 |
British Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod's constitutional plan is accepted by the Kenyan
conference. |
|
| 16 |
1941 |
Remaining Italian forces are expelled form the Sudan. |
| 16 |
1977 |
The Most Reverend Janani Luwum, Anglican archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Boga-Zaïre,
is killed whilst under arrest for sedition and arms smuggling. Although the official cause of death was given
as a car crash, it was revealed that Luwum and two prominent government officials were killed on the orders of
Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, Ugandan head of state. |
|
