ON THIS DAY MAY 5

1821 Ousted French Emperor Napoleon dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena.

1866 Britain claims sovereignty and dominion over the guano-rich Ichaboe and adjacent island, the scene of one of Namibia’s lesserknown tales of colonial greed for the “white gold” that at one stage covered the islands up to a depth of 7m thick. (A corruption of the word ‘wanu’, guano was cherished by the Incas as a natural fertiliser long before the colonisers in Peru cottoned on to its worth.) Then a retired British mariner recalled an account by an old US sea captain of islands covered in bird manure, sparking the ‘Guano Rush’ some 15 years later.

1877 The American Indian Wars: Chief Sitting Bull leads his band of Lakota to Canada to avoid harassment by the US Army.

1925 Afrikaans is established as an official language in South Africa.

1941 The first modern perfume, Chanel No. 5 is released by fashion designer Coco Chanel. 1942 A combined British military and naval force, including many South Africans, lands on Madagascar and by the afternoon the town of Diego Suarez has been captured from the Vichy French.

1945 Six people are killed when a Japanese fire balloon explodes near Bly, Oregon. They are the only Americans killed in the contiguous US by Japan during World War II.

1945 Admiral Karl Dönitz, leader of Germany after Hitler’s death, orders all U-boats to return to their bases. (For nearly seven decades, Dönitz was the only head of state to be convicted by an international tribunal until the conviction of Liberia’s Charles Taylor in 2012.) 1980 In full view of the world’s press, British SAS commandos storm the Iranian embassy in London to end a six-day siege.

1981 Bobby Sands, dies in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, after a 66-day hunger-strike. 2021 Evidence of Africa’s earliest burial, a three-year-old boy, 78 000 years ago, in a cave in Kenya, is published. | THE HISTORIAN