ON THIS DAY JANUARY 14

1514 Pope Leo X issues a papal bull against slavery.

1898 Australian cricketer Joe Darling hits the first six in Tests (out of the ground).

1904 Violence escalates in German South West Africa during the Herero Revolt.

1911 Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition makes landfall on the eastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

1914 The Gandhi-Smuts Agreement is reached between General Jan Smuts and Mahatma Gandhi regarding voluntary registration, poll tax and the recognition of Indian marriages. 1943 Japan begins Operation Ke to evacuate its forces from Guadalcanal during the World War II campaign.

1949 During “one fierce burst of terror which lasted from Friday afternoon, January 14, to Saturday morning, January 15”, blacks descend on Indian shops and homes in Durban while the forces of law and order look on. The result: 142 people of all races dead, 1 087 injured, and a factory, 58 stores and 247 dwellings destroyed. The outburst, concludes RW Nowbath, ex-editor of The Leader newspaper, was the result of the shocking conditions under which the African people are compelled to live in and around Durban.

1967 Counterculture of the 1960s: The Human Be-In takes place at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California, launching the Summer of Love.

1969 An accidental explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, near Hawaii, kills 27 people.

1972 Queen Margrethe II of Denmark ascends the throne, the first Queen of Denmark since 1412, and the first Danish monarch not named Frederick or Christian since 1513.

1989 Salman Rushdie’s book Satanic Verses is burned by 1 000 Muslims in Bradford, England.

2007 Test pilot Marina Popovich is awarded the title “Hero of the Nation” by the Russian Federation for excelling in the field of aviation. “Madam Mig” was the holder of 102 aviation world records and committed to the search for extraterrestrial life, but noted that 90% of UFO sightings were due to hallucinations, space debris, marsh gas, weather balloons, first ascendancy stars and Friday-night vodka parties.

2010 Yemen declares an open war against the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

2015 Floods in Mozambique and Malawi leave 63 people dead and 70 000 homeless.

2019 Pawel Adamowicz, the mayor of Gdańsk, Poland, is stabbed on stage at a charity event. He dies two days later. | THE HISTORIAN