ON THIS DAY MARCH 20

1616 Explorer Walter Raleigh is released after 13 years from the Tower of London and told to go seek gold in Guyana.

1703 Akō incident: 46 of the 47 surviving Ronin commit seppuku (ritual suicide) as recompense for avenging their master’s death in Edo.

1902 In the British House of Commons, Prime Minister David Lloyd George suggests that there are as many as 30 000 armed blacks in British military employ in South Africa.

1904 Fietas, Johannesburg, a mixed population area, is evacuated and burned to the ground.

1915 Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity.

1920 Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand arrive in Wynberg after the first flight from London to Cape Town. It took a month and a half and would lead to the formation of the South African Air Force, the world’s second-oldest after the Royal Air Force.

1930 American fast food restaurant chain KFC is founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in North Corbin, Kentucky, US.

1942 General Douglas MacArthur vows “I came through and I shall return” after escaping the Japanese-occupied Philippines.

1947 Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Dr Monty Naicker meet Mahatma Gandhi in Patna, Bihar state in eastern India, and hold several hours of discussions; and a record 18-ton blue whale is caught in the South Atlantic.

1995 The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo carries out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and wounding more than 6 200 people; and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II addresses the South African Parliament.

2001 Petrobras 36 Oil Platform, the world’s largest oil rig, sinks with 400 000 US gallons of fuel and crude oil aboard.

2003 A US-led coalition launches a ground invasion of Iraq after an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Iraq expires.

2012 Fifty people are killed and 240 injured in a wave of terror attacks across 10 cities in Iraq; while Disney movie John Carter records one of the largest losses in cinema history, with a $200 million dollar write down.

2016 Barack Obama becomes the first US President to visit Cuba since 1928. | The Historian