Today is Star Wars Day because it allows us all to say May The 4th Be With You.
1535 Five Carthusian monks in London are hung, drawn and quartered for refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.
1842 Cape Governor George Napier sends Waterloo veteran Captain Charlton Smith with 125 men of Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers by land to re-occupy the Durban – which was evacuated by the British in 1839 – to deny the Vootrekkers a port.
1843 Natal is proclaimed a British colony.
1860 The Orange Free State makes peace with Moshesh, ending the first Basuto war.
1893 Cowboy Bill Pickett invents bulldogging: grabbing cattle by the horns and wrestling them to the ground
1932 Mobster Al Capone begins serving an 11-year prison term for tax evasion.
1942 The Battle of the Coral Sea begins with an attack from the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown on naval forces at Tulagi Island in the Solomon Islands. The Japanese forces had invaded Tulagi the day before.
1946 A deadly two-day prison strike at the Alcatraz ends when US Marines storm it.
1949 The entire Italian Torino club football team is killed in a plane crash.
1953 Ernest Hemingway wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.
1960 PAC president Robert Sobukwe is sentenced to three years in jail for incitement. He refuses to appeal, saying the court has no jurisdiction because it could not be considered a court of law or a court of justice.
1978 South African parabats attack a Swapo base at Cassinga in Angola, killing 600 people.
1982 HMS Sheffield is hit by a missile during the Falklands War, 20 sailors die.
1996 Violence in KZN spills into the streets of Durban and running gun battles ensue.
2007 Bob Woolmer is cremated in Cape Town. It is believed that Pakistan coach was strangled in his hotel room after Pakistan’s shock Cricket World Cup defeat by Ireland.
2018 California overtakes Great Britain to become the world’s fifth-largest economy.
2020 Countries in Europe begin cautious reopenings after their Covid-19 lockdown. Italy restarts construction and takeaways, and Germany reopens schools.
2021 Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador makes a historic apology to the Mayan people, of whom there are about 6 million, for abuses against them in the five centuries starting with the Spanish conquest.
2021 Malian woman Halima Cisse gives birth to nonuplets (nine babies) in Morocco, in only the third-known case worldwide.