JM Coetzee gets much of his inspiration and support from his Eastern Cape-born partner, Dorothy Driver, who is now an English professor
Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
1187 Saladin captures Jerusalem.
1492 England’s King Henry VII invades France.
1836 After 5 years at sea, Charles Darwin returns to England aboard the HMS Beagle with his thinking about the origin of the species radically altered.
1869 Mohandas Gandhi is born in Porbandar, Gujarat, India. An Indian firm in the Transvaal offers him work and he arrives in Durban in 1893 to serve as legal counsel to a merchant.
1899 Christiaan de Wet, 45, and his eldest son, Kotie, are called up as ordinary burghers in the Heilbron commando. His sons, Izak and Christiaan, enlist as volunteers and the four report for duty in the coming Anglo-Boer War. Riding Fleur, the white Arab horse he bought for the war, De Wet, as a general would go on to launch a guerilla-style offensive for which he was to become legendary.
1904 German General Lothar von Trotha issues the extermination order for Nambia’s Herero people – the first genocide of the 20th century – in which 65 000 Herero and 100 000 Nama die.
1942 The converted liner Queen Mary, carrying thousands of US troops, slices through the cruiser HMS Curacao, killing 239 ratings.
1971 A homing pigeon sets a record of 133km/h in a 1 100km race in Australia.
1975 The Ulster Volunteer Force kill 7 civilians in a series of attacks across Northern Ireland, but four of its members die after their bomb explodes unexpectedly.
1980 Muhammad ‘The Greatest’ Ali, 38, comes out of retirement to challenge undefeated world heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes. After being pounded unmercifully for 10 rounds, Ali’s corner throws in the towel.
2003 Reclusive author JM Coetzee wins the Nobel Prize for Lterature for his dark meditations on South Africa, colonialism and apartheid which have been acclaimed for reflecting the human condition.
2016 Kim Kardashian is robbed at gunpoint in her hotel in Paris of jewellery worth $10m.
2018 Journalist Jamal Khashoggi enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he is tortured to death.
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