Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981 CE (Gregorian calendar), 1974 in the Ethiopian calendar, the year of the golden rooster, on a Sunday. If she were Ghanaian, her name would be akosua/akos for short. During the same year of her birth, there were perhaps 22 recorded Atlantic Ocean hurricanes and 4 Indian Ocean cyclones close to Mozambique. Umkhonto We Sizwe performs numerous underground assaults against the apartheid state. Zaire is the premier producer of the world’s cobalt; In Chile, the Water Code is established, separating water ownership from land ownership; an International NGO Conference on Indigenous Populations and the Land is held in Geneva; Bob Marley dies; an annular solar eclipse is visible in the Pacific Ocean; USA and Japan are in the leading position in the seabed-mining industry, Thomas Sankara rides a bike to his first cabinet meeting; the Slave trade is officialy abolished in Mauritania; Machu Picchu is declared a heritage site; New Zealand recognised 16 rivers and lakes as “Outstanding” and protected them in perpetuity. Hurricane Katrina brings floods to the Caribbean. A Haiti-US Agreement allows the US Coast Guard to patrol the sea corridor between Haiti and Cuba. It is said that right whales born in that year are taller than right whales born since. Her paternal grandmother dies affected by dementia; Other concurrent events of the year of her birth, and of her lifetime, are perhaps too many to fully know; some things continued, some shifted, others ended, some began, some transformed. The world’s human population was then apparently at around 4.529 billion. Today she is one amongst 7 billion – occupying multiple adjectives.

Image credits: Matteo De Fina