Die Republiek

31 Mei 1961 · national · Cape Colony / South Africa

South Africa leaves the Commonwealth. Nobody who took a grant here in 1841 is alive to see it. THAT IS AS FAR AS THIS PROJECT CAN PUT IT, and the arithmetic is worth showing rather than rounding: of the eleven 1841 grantees the model records, SEVEN have no death date at all, and the latest death it does hold is Pieter Johannes Swanepoel in 1885. An earlier version of this line said the last of them had been dead for forty years, which the record cannot establish, because a claim about the LAST of a group is a claim about absence and seven of the eleven are simply undated. Corrected 1 Aug 2026 per 10. [Added 1 Aug 2026 as timeline context: general history, no source row, and it is here because it bears on this district rather than because it is famous.]