ON THIS DAY
JULY 11
1405 Chinese Admiral Zheng He, with a large fleet of junks, some of them with nine masts, sets sail on the first of seven voyages to map the world. They visit almost all of the world long before Europeans and have an enormous effect on the civilisations outside of China, but little is made known of it in the West.
1895 The first automobile race, from Paris to Bordeaux (1 178km), takes place.
1899 Fiat, parent company of Ferrari, is starts 1915 The German cruiser Königsberg is scuttled in the Rufiji River, near Dar-es-Salam, after being cornered in dense mangroves by an English fleet. Durban pilot Denis Cutlerd makes his seaplane available as a spotter for the naval gunners. Wilbur Smith wrote a bestselling novel, Shout at the Devil, about it.
1924 Scot Eric Liddell wins the 400m gold medal at the Paris Olympics, after refusing to run on a Sunday in the 100m heat. He dies in a Japanese civilian internment camp in 1945. 1963 Security police raid Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, arresting the nucleus of the leadership of the ANC’s armed wing.
1995 The Srebrenica massacre – the mass murder of 8 000 Bosnian Muslims and the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II – begins after Dutch peacekeeping forces turn away thousands of civilians from safety during the UN-led war in the former Yugoslavia. 2006 Mumbai bomb attacks kill 209 people. 2010 Spain beats the Netherlands, 1-0 in the World Cup final in Johannesburg.
2019 The last VW Beetle leaves the factory, 80 years after the iconic car was first produced.
2021 Wholesale looting, vandalism and arson spreads from KwaZulu-Natal to Gauteng. The police are overwhelmed by the scale of events and residents man blockades, preventing outsiders from entering suburbs. Panic buying causes the restricted sale of items because it is too dangerous to resupply shops. Fuelled by inflammatory statements over ex-president Jacob Zuma’s arrest, the violence will cost the live of 354 people and billions of rand in damages by the time it ends on July 18.
2022 A study suggests that dogs can ‘see’ with their noses in the “first documentation of a direct connection between the olfactory bulb and occipital lobe in any species”.