ON THIS DAY APRIL 11
1838 Zulu warriors ambush and kill Boer hero Piet Uys, his son, Dirkie, and seven others at Italeni.
1902 The last major battle of the Anglo-Boer War occurs in Rooiwal Valley, near Klerksdorp – 2 600 mounted Boers attack 11 000 British in an entrenched hillside position and lose. 1905 The Victoria Falls Bridge and railway line are completed, linking Zambia to Zimbabwe. 1938 Captain Charles Barnard begins a record-breaking flight from London to Cape Town. What today takes 11 hours, took him 91 hours and 20 minutes.
1951 US President Harry Truman fires his top general in Korea, war hero General Douglas MacArthur, because of insubordination and a desire to nuke the Chinese.
1961 The widely publicised trial of one of the Holocaust’s major organisers, Adolf Eichmann, who was plucked from hiding in Argentina by secret agents, begins in Jerusalem. Later found guilty and hanged, prosecutors would hear that Eichmann – described as the ‘banality of evil’ – said he would ‘leap laughing into the grave because five million people on his conscience was a source of satisfaction’. 1980 Dr Canaan Banana is selected as the first president of the Republic of Zimbabwe. 1981 A riot in Brixton, London, leaves almost 300 police and 65 civilians injured.
2000 South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje is sacked by the Proteas because of match-fixing allegations.
2019 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is forcibly removed by police from Ecuador’s London embassy where he had sought asylum for the past seven years.
2021 In an unusual occurrence, Cyclone Seroja makes landfall in Western Australia near the town of Kalbarri,causing considerable damage. (It’s rare for cyclones to strike the east coast of continents.)
2023 Astronomers record the largest cosmic explosion yet. It has a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness 2 trillion times that of the sun’s, is thought to be large gas cloud entering a supermassive black hole eight million light years away. 2023 The Russian volcano Shiveluch erupts and spews ash 20km into the air.