Events

• The Republic of New Scotland is set up in what is now the Amsterdam region in Mpumalanga
  Mpumalanga
  Mpumalanga , is a province of South Africa. The name means east or literally "the place where the sun rises" in Swazi, Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu. Mpumalanga lies in eastern South Africa, north of KwaZulu-Natal and bordering Swaziland and Mozambique. It constitutes 6.5% of South Africa's land area...
  
  
• Bloemhof is founded on the banks of the Vaal River
  Vaal River
  The Vaal River is the largest tributary of the Orange River in South Africa. The river has its source in the Drakensberg mountains in Mpumalanga, east of Johannesburg and about 30 km north of Ermelo and only about 240 km from the Indian Ocean. It then flows westwards to its conjunction...
  
   when diamond
  Diamond
  In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...
  
  s are discovered in the area
• 2 February - Johannes Henricus Brand
  Jan Brand
  Sir Johannes Henricus Brand, GCMG was a South African lawyer and politician, and the fourth state president of the Orange Free State, from 2 February 1864 until his death in 1888...
  
   is inaugurated as the fourth president of the Orange Free State
  Orange Free State
  The Orange Free State was an independent Boer republic in southern Africa during the second half of the 19th century, and later a British colony and a province of the Union of South Africa. It is the historical precursor to the present-day Free State province...
  
  

Deaths

• 1 February - David Hume
  David Hume (explorer)
  David Hume was a Scottish-South African explorer and big-game hunter.David Hume was born in Berwick, Scotland and went to South Africa with Benjamin Moodie's Scottish settlers in 1817. He became a pioneer trader, explorer and renowned big-game hunter...
  
  , explorer and big-game hunter, dies in Grahamstown
  Grahamstown
  Grahamstown is a city in the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa and is the seat of the Makana municipality. The population of greater Grahamstown, as of 2003, was 124,758. The population of the surrounding areas, including the actual city was 41,799 of which 77.4% were black,...
  
  at the age of 66