ON THIS DAY DECEMBER 1

1640 Portugal regains independence after 60 years of Spanish rule.

1834 Slavery is abolished at the Cape. Former slaves were now apprenticed to their masters for a period of four years, allowing them to learn trades and affording a transition period for the owners. The abolition of slavery and the way in which it was enacted was one of the contributing factors leading to the Great Trek (starting in 1835).

1822 Dom Pedro, founder of the Brazilian Empire, is crowned first emperor of Brazil.

1884 American Old West: Near Frisco, New Mexico, deputy sheriff Elfego Baca holds off a gang of 80 Texan cowboys who want to kill him for arresting Charles Mccarthy.

1900 Exiled President of Transvaal Paul Kruger visits Flanders and on the same day is declined a visit from the German Kaiser

1913 The Ford Motor Company institutes world’s first moving assembly line.

1929 Bingo is invented.

1934 Leningrad mayor Sergey Kirov is assassinated and Joseph Stalin uses it as a reason to begin his four-year-long Great Purge.

1955 The birth of the modern American civil rights movement occurs as Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man and move to the back section of a municipal bus. Her arrest results in a year-long boycott of the city bus system by African Americans and leads to legal actions ending racial segregation on municipal buses throughout the South.

1984 American boxer Greg Page KOS home town favourite Gerrie Coetzee in 8th round to win WBA heavyweight title in Sun City.

1988 A cyclone hits Bangladesh, leaving 596 people dead and half a million homeless.

1988 Benazir Bhutto is nominated to become prime minister of Pakistan – and the first woman to govern a Muslim nation.

1989 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the first Soviet Russian leader to visit the Vatican and meet the Pope, thus ending 72 years of strict atheist policy in Communist Russia.

1990 England is connected to mainland

Europe for the first time since the Ice Age as engineers digging a tunnel under the English Channel break through the last rock layer.

1994 The head of the UN Commission on Rwanda estimates that 500 000 deaths have occurred in the country because of genocide.

2018 Violent demonstrations break out in Paris, France, by the yellow-vest movement.

2018 Egyptian actress Rania Youssef charged for “inciting debauchery” after wearing seethrough dress to Cairo film festival. | THE HISTORIAN