ON THIS 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 deadly virus, resulting in 500 000 deaths. South Africa was the fifth-hardest hit country, with deaths almost as high as those in the US, out of a global death toll worldwide of almost 22 million. It has been called “the single most devastating episode in South Africa’s demographic history”.

1941 The Lend-Lease programme begins, allowing Britain to receive American weapons, machines, raw materials, training and repair services. Ships, planes, guns and shells, along with food, clothing and metals went to the embattled British while American warships began patrolling the North Atlantic and US troops were stationed in Greenland and Iceland. By 1946, the figure reached $50 billion in aid from the US to its Allies.

1946 Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, is captured by British troops. (A brutally efficient murderer, he introduced the pesticide Zyklon B, containing hydrogen cyanide, into the killing process. Under his watch, Auschwitz became the most efficiently murderous instrument of the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust’s most potent symbol. During his time there, about 3.5 million people died in captivity. He was hanged in the camp.)

1958 A US bomber accidentally drops a nuclear bomb on a family home in South Carolina, creating a crater 75ft wide and injuring six people. Fortunately, the fissile nuclear core was stored elsewhere on the aircraft.

1981 Hundreds of Kosovo’s University of Pristina students protest for political rights, which leads to the Kosovo War and independence from Yugoslavia.

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

1994 Responding to a request by Chief Lucas Mangope for help restoring control in Bophuthatswana, the right-wing AWB randomly kills 42 people, and, before the world’s press and TV cameras, two are executed by a Bophuthatswana policeman.

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

2016 At least 21 people are killed by mudslides in and around São Paulo, Brazil.