Wherio #23 — August 4th, 2026

Mauritania became independent from France on November 28, 1960, formally ending its status within the French colonial system. Moktar Ould Daddah, who had led the territorial government, became the country’s first president. The new state governed from a recently developed capital near the Atlantic coast. November 28 is observed annually as Mauritania’s Independence Day.

The Larabanga Mosque, tradition holds, was founded in a small village in what is now Ghana’s Savanna Region, and stands as the oldest mosque in the country and one of the oldest in West Africa. Built in the Sudanese style of whitewashed mud and timber, bristling with wooden support beams, the ‘Mecca of West Africa’ houses a Quran that locals believe arrived as a gift from heaven in 1650. Restored many times, most recently in 2023 with World Monuments Fund support, it has helped revive traditional adobe craftsmanship.

India unveiled the Statue of Unity on 31 October 2018, the anniversary of independence leader Vallabhbhai Patel’s birth. Standing 182 metres high above the Narmada River in Gujarat, it is the world’s tallest statue and is nearly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty measured without its pedestal. Sculptor Ram V. Sutar designed the figure of Patel, who helped integrate hundreds of princely states into independent India. The bronze-clad monument contains viewing facilities and forms the centerpiece of a large visitor complex near the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled by her own crew in the River Plate estuary off Montevideo, Uruguay, days after the Battle of the River Plate against three British and New Zealand cruisers. Damaged and granted only a short stay in the neutral harbor, captain Hans Langsdorff chose to destroy his ship rather than face the Royal Navy force he believed was massing outside; he shot himself days later. The commerce raider’s dramatic end was an early Allied morale victory in the Second World War.

In Australia’s first and only military coup, officers of the New South Wales Corps marched on Government House in Sydney and deposed Governor William Bligh, the same officer overthrown two decades earlier in the mutiny on the Bounty. Bligh had been sent to break the so-called Rum Corps’ grip on the colony, including its monopoly over the illicit rum trade, and clashed with powerful figures like John Macarthur. The rebels ran the colony until London dispatched Lachlan Macquarie with his own regiment to restore order.