BACK IN THE DAY

MARCH 11

1870 King Moshoeshoe, founder of the Basotho nation, dies.

1900 British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury rejects peace overtures from Paul Kruger. 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ first reaches America. One quarter of the US population contracts the virus, resulting in 500 000 deaths. South Africa was the fifth-hardest hit country in the world with deaths almost as high as those in the US, out of a global death toll of almost 22 million. It has been called ‘the single most devastating episode in South Africa’s demographic history’. 1941 The World War II Lend-Lease programme begins, allowing embattled Britain to receive an American lifeline of weapons and materials. 1946 Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, is captured by British troops. Under his watch, Auschwitz became the most efficiently murderous instrument of the ‘Final Solution’ and the Holocaust’s most potent symbol, with 3.5 million people dying in captivity. He was hanged in the camp.

1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the last leader of the Soviet Union. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) help end the Cold War.

1994 The right-wing AWB group randomly kills 42 people in Bophuthatswana and, in front of the world’s press, two of their number are executed in retaliation by a Bophuthatswana policeman.

2004 Simultaneous explosions on rush-hour trains in Madrid, Spain, kill 192 people.

2011 An earthquake off Japan creates a tsunami that sweeps inland, killing about 16 000 people, causes damage along the North and South American coasts and breaks off icebergs in Antarctica, 13 000km away. The waves surge over the seawalls at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to devastating radioactive leaks. 2020 Covid-19 is declared a pandemic by the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with 121 564 cases worldwide and 4 373 deaths.

2020 The smallest dinosaur ever discovered – its tiny skull is preserved in a piece of amber smaller than a fingertip, and found in a mine in Myanmar – is reported on in the journal Nature. | THE HISTORIAN