ON THIS DAY MARCH 25

1199 Richard I (aka The Lionheart) is fatally wounded by a crossbow bolt in France.

1306 Robert the Bruce becomes King of Scots (Scotland).

1609 The Dutch East India Company orders Henry Hudson to try again to find a northwestern sea route to India.

1658 The Amersfoort, with around 170 slaves taken from a Portuguese ship, arrives in Table Bay, beginning slavery in the Cape.

1807 The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act is passed by the British Parliament. It outlaws the slave trade within the British Empire. Any British captain who was caught transporting slaves was fined £100 for every slave found on-board. However, this law did not stop the British slave trade. If slave ships were in danger of being captured by the British navy, captains often reduced the fines they had to pay by ordering the slaves thrown overboard.

1811 Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

1835 Durban pioneer Captain Allen Gardiner establishes the first educational institution in Natal when a school for black children opens its doors on the Berea.

1919 US President Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations becomes a reality after the League Covenant is adopted at the Paris Peace Conference.

1939 Billboard Magazine introduces a hillbilly (country) music chart.

1957 The European Economic Community (forerunner to the EU) is established with

West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg as the first members.

1965 Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King jr successfully complete their four-day, 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.

1972 Birth of South African race car driver Giniel de Villiers.

1990 The first of more than 100 persons to die during the “Seven Day’s War”, is murdered outside Pietermaritzburg.

About 30 000 people flee and 3 000 houses are burned.

1998 US President Bill Clinton acknowledges that the US and the world failed to protect Rwandans from the 1994 campaign of genocide that killed half a million.

2018 Australian cricket captain Steve Smith is given a one-match ban after admitting that members of the Australian team had tampered with the ball the previous day, during the third Test against South Africa at Newlands.