Today is the anniversary of SACP leader Chris Hani's murder.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. | Aristotle
Your body has more bacterial cells than human cells.
1663 On this day in history, April 10, bananas – eaten all over the world today, but were unknown back then – are first sold in England. The strange new, exotic fruit from the New World came from Bermuda.
1652 Jan van Riebeeck starts building the clay-and-timber Fort de Goede Hoop, on the coastline of what becomes Cape Town.
1820 More British settlers land at Algoa Bay (Gqeberha). The Crown gives them land to farm on the eastern edge of the Cape colony, effectively making them human shields against the original inhabitants, the Xhosa people.
1896 Greece’s Spyridon Louis wins the first Olympic marathon in Athens; and runs the last lap with an excited Greek king, Constantine I.
1918 Ace fighter pilot Albert ‘Zulu’ Lewis is born in Kimberley. Lewis was the second-highest scoring ‘Saffa’ in the Battle of Britain – behind Adolf ‘Sailor’ Malan – and achieved the rare status of ‘Ace in a Day’ (5 kills) twice. Both, however, fall well short of the achievements of another South African, who, unlike them, did not survive World War II. Killed in battle during the chaotic last days of the fall of Greece in 1941, he was Marmaduke Thomas St John Pattle, 26. ‘Pat’ Pattle was so deadly in the air that he notched up 41 confirmed kills, possibly 60, making him the war’s top-scoring British Commonwealth pilot.
1993 Chris Hani, considered a successor to Nelson Mandela, is assassinated in his driveway in Boksburg. The murder of the SACP leader and uMkhonto we Sizwe chief-of-staff shocks the world and makes the spectre of a full-blown race war seem very likely.
2024 South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol is soundly beaten in a general election amid claims that he was brought down by a spring onion. While his downfall was caused by an attempt to declare martial law, the ‘spring onion’ gaffe – he remarked favourably about the price of spring onions that had been heavily marked down especially for his visit – is viewed as a turning point with an electorate frustrated with how out-of-step he was with the public. Thousands of spring-onion memes poke fun at him.
2026 In February, a court sentences Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison after finding him guilty of insurrection, illegal mobilisation of the military, and abuse of power.
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