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What happened in 1998

• Black footballer Justin Fashanu died. Justin was the elder brother of footballer, John Fashanu and was also one of the first prominent British sportsmen to be openly gay. In the 1980s he was the first black player transferred for £1m, yet after coming out his career fell apart; he was dropped by his first division club, went to the third division and then to the US to coach. While there in 1998 he was charged with sexually assaulting a 17 year old boy. He subsequently disappeared and committed suicide in London.
• Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, was paralysed by food riots. A protest turned violent when riot police used clubs and teargas to push more than 1,000 demonstrators out of the city centre. It would be three years before the government would admit that the country faced food shortages.
• A task force published the first report on racism in UK football. The inquiry found that racism was deeply entrenched in the game. At a time when black footballers were succeeding at the highest level, the number of black spectators was decreasing.
• The Rwandan authorities publicly executed 22 people found guilty of charges connected with the 1994 genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The condemned were shot in five locations around the country.
• Lt. General Siphiwe Nyanda, a former ANC guerrilla, took over as the first black head of the South Africa's armed forces. He succeeded General Georg Meiring, who had retired. President Mandela announced the appointment of Tito Mboweni, 39, the country's youth minister, as the next head of the Reserve Bank. News of the appointment of a man with no banking experience to run the troubled South African economy was greeted with disbelief by economists. The rand slumped to a new low.
• On the occasion of his 80th birthday, Mandela married Graca Machel, 52, his long time companion and the widow of Mozambique's first President, at a private ceremony in the President's Johannesburg mansion.
• President of Congo Laurent Kabila ordered all the Rwandan troops who helped him gain power in 1997 to leave the country. The decree was the first step towards a conflict that would last two years.
• The bankrupt government of President Robert Mugabe reneged on pledges given to white farmers, western governments and international organisations in 1997 and issued orders for the immediate seizure of 841 white-owned farms. A long struggle with the international community began and there were food shortages.
• Footballer Ian Wright launched the his own six-part chat show, Friday Night's All Wright.
• J.C. Watts, a Congressman from Oklahoma, becomes the first African American to be elected to a position of leadership in the Republican Party.
• Up to 100,000 people died in the 1998 famine in Southern Sudan. But the following year the British Red Cross claimed that aid from the UK had at least helped save the lives of 250,000 people.
• The convicted killer of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray, died aged 70. Ray was still protesting his innocence. Officials in the Tennessee prison department said he died in hospital where he was being treated for terminal liver disease. Dr King died from a single rifle shot in 1968 and the assassination sparked race riots in more than 100 cities and set off one of the biggest manhunts in US history.