ON THIS DAY MARCH 24

1593 The Santo Alberto is wrecked on the coast of Pondoland. The survivors who reached Delagoa Bay established greater contact with the Bantu.

1842 The Brazilia arrives from the Netherlands and hastens the annexation of Port Natal.

1846 Henry Warden orders the British troops to be moved from Philippolis to Bloemfontein, the farm he wrote about the previous day to the governor.

1855 Olive Schreiner is born in the

Eastern Cape. Her best-known work, The Story of an African Farm, appeared under the nom de plume of Ralph Iron.

1882 German bacteriologist Robert Koch announces the isolation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is responsible for TB and which is of great significance to sufferers in South Africa.

1902 Mr HR Fox, the secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society, after being made aware by Emily Hobhouse of the plight of blacks in British concentration camps, writes to the Colonial Office, asking that for conditions at least equal to those of the Boer refugees. In response, Sir Montagu Ommaney records that it seems undesirable “to trouble Lord Milner… merely to satisfy this busybody”.

1906 “Census of the British Empire” shows Great Britain rules a fifth of the world.

1944 In an event dramatised in the movie, The Great Escape, 76 Allied prisoners of war begin breaking out of the German camp Stalag Luft III.

1980 El Salvadorian Archbishop Óscar Romero is assassinated celebrating Mass.

1989 In Prince William Sound in Alaska, the tanker Exxon Valdez spills 240 000 barrels (42.7 million litres) of crude oil after running aground.

1993 President FW de Klerk tells Parliament that South Africa built six nuclear fission devices but they were dismantled by the end of 1989.

1999 Nato attacks Yugoslavia – the first time it has attacked a sovereign country.

2015 A plane crashes in the French Alps in an apparent pilot mass murder-suicide, killing all 150 people on board.

2018 Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft is caught scuffing the match ball during a cricket Test in Cape Town, resulting in an infamous ball tampering scandal.