18 August 1870 – A Dispute Over the Diamond Fields

Presidents Marthinus Wessel Pretorius of the South African Republic and Johannes Brand of the Orange Free State met Griqua leader Nicolaas Waterboer and his representative, David Arnot, at Nooitgedacht to discuss competing claims to ownership of the increasingly valuable diamond fields.

The meeting failed to resolve the dispute. As diamonds rapidly transformed the region, questions over land ownership and political authority became increasingly contentious, eventually drawing in the British government and helping reshape the political geography of the area that would become Kimberley.

SA is banned from the Olympic Games - 1964

In October 1963, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided in Baden-Baden, Germany, that South Africa would have to eliminate racial discrimination in sport before 31 December 1963, or the country would not be permitted to send a team to the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Though the deadline was later extended to allow SA more time, the government was not prepared to permit multiracial sport. As a result, the IOC did not invite SA to the Olympic Games in Tokyo. This was a heavy blow for South African sporting circles and its supporters.

Following Prime Minister J. B. Vorster's relaxed sports policy, an IOC committee visited SA in September 1967 to examine the situation. The committee presented a favourable report and stated that SA had undertaken to send a multiracial team, selected on merit, to the next Olympic Games. On the strength of this report, SA was invited to the 1968 Games in Mexico, but this elicited such sharp protests from African countries, who threatened to withdraw if SA participated, that the IOC was obliged to withdraw its invitation in April, 1969. The ban was lifted only before the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, when the international community became convinced that SA was irrevocably on the road to political transformation and democracy.

Steven Biko is arrested - 1977

Stephen Bantu Biko was the first president of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO), a black students’ organisation focused on resisting and liberating from apartheid. In 1973, he was banned by the apartheid government. Under the ban, he was restricted to his hometown, King William’s Town and could not speak to the public or talk with media representatives. Biko worked undercover and created the Zimele Trust Fund to aid political prisoners and their families. On 18 August 1977, he was arrested on his way home from a political meeting and detained in Port Elizabeth under the Terrorism Act. This arrest was one of several, each on different charges, including various allegations that he had broken his banning orders and a charge of obstructing the course of justice by persuading witnesses in a political trial to change their evidence. Biko was thirty years old and healthy when he was arrested. He was first taken to Port Elizabeth prison and, on 11 September, was transferred to Pretoria, where he died in hospital after assaults in police custody. The police officers who had held Biko were questioned, but none of them confirmed his cause of death. Two decades after his death in 1997, five former officers confessed to killing Biko. They applied for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but the application was denied. Biko was buried on 25 September 1977 in the Ginsberg cemetery outside King William’s Town.