Nelson Mandela rejects PW Botha’s offer of a conditional release from prison. Later FW de Klerk announces that he will release Madiba without any conditions, and an admission that 17 million people were arrested because influx control laws – these are some of the things that happened on this day (February 10) in history
AD60 St Paul is shipwrecked on Malta.
1258 Baghdad falls to the Mongols, bringing an end to the Islamic Golden Age.
1535 Forty Anabaptists run naked through Amsterdam because they are fed up with a dominant religion (Catholicism) in bed with the wealthy, without a thought for the poor. The city officials have them massacred.
1840 Commandant-General MW Pretorius installs Mpande as king of the Zulus after the power of Mpande’s brother, Dingane, is broken at Magongo on the Umkuzi River.
1890 Boris Pasternak, Russian poet, novelist (author of Doctor Zhivago), literary translator and Nobel Prize laureate, is born.
1901 General Christiaan de Wet invades the Cape Colony at Zanddrif, near Philippolis.
1906 HMS Dreadnought, the first of a new breed of battleship, is christened, rendering all other capital ships obsolete.
1916 The Cerro Azul No. 4 oil well, in Mexico, blows her top and gushes 600 feet in the air.
1954 US President Dwight Eisenhower warns against the US becoming involved in Vietnam.
1962 Captured American U2 spy-plane pilot Gary Powers is exchanged for a Soviet spy.
1964 An Australian aircraft carrier, HMAS Melbourne, collides with and sinks the destroyer HMAS Voyager off New South Wales, Australia, killing 82 seamen.
1984 Kenyan soldiers slaughter 5 000 ethnic Somali Kenyans.
1985 Nelson Mandela rejects president PW Botha’s offer of a conditional release.
1990 President FW de Klerk announces Nelson Mandela will be freed on February 11.
1991 Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok says that more than 17 million people were arrested under the country’s influx control laws between 1921 and 1986.
1996 IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess for the first time.
2009 Two communications satellites collide in orbit, destroying each other.
2013 Five people are killed by a falling lifeboat from a cruise ship in the Canary islands.
2021 Astronomers confirm that the planetoid named Farfarout is the most distant object orbiting the Sun – almost four times more distant from the Sun than Pluto is.