The biggest and most damaging earthquake to wreak havoc in Morocco was in 1960 when it killed up to 18,000 people and caused a major disruption to the “Year of Africa,” marking the official beginning of the end to colonial government on that continent and the start of a hurricane of armed opposition to Apartheid.

This particularly dangerous seismic mishap of 63 years ago occurred during my time when I worked as a foreign correspondent and journalist between Cairo and Cape Town.

On that occasion, it almost totally demolished the city of Agadir in Western Morocco near the Straits of Gibraltar adjoining Spain and Portugal and, in addition to the death toll, caused serious life threatening injuries to over 20,000 men, women and children.

At the time, this deadly 5.8 magnitude break in the earth’s crust became a prominent component in many of my pan- African media reports on political and other matters. It proved to even the most hardy of intending African terrorists that we human beings can be snuffed out in seconds by angry and unexpected elements  totally beyond  our control.

Within the United Nations itself, the political vagaries of 1960 and the Agadir effect on African homelessness and life caused many world diplomats to call for the urgent first ever creation of extra special economic aid plans for Africa.

Agadir also seriously affected the immediate bringing together of Africa’s first true independence movements and the subsequent emergence of Africa as a major world voting force in the United Nations and the closing down of Africa’s colonial territories by Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The planned ending of control by the world’s top colonial countries was initially foreshadowed that same year when I accompanied Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, on his ‘Winds of Change” tour down Africa to promise eventual self-government to the African people.

When the widespread economic and physical affects of the 1960 Agadir earthquake became apparent to observers, including myself, the threatened fragility of parts of the continent became a major source of concern to all would-be future African presidents waiting in the wings of time to take over the running of their individual states.

Various successfully voted-in post-Independence African leaders, such as Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela later told me in interviews that the Agadir earthquake and its multi million dollar devastation gave them and their fellow African political freedom seekers serious second thoughts.

They had feared that the vast cost of re-construction following such a regular occurrence as a nation-wide earthquake made them feel insecure as potential heads of government. They feared for a while after the Agadir incident that their future loss of financial support from their colonial masters could make their countries bankrupt virtually over night unless  they could encourage Russia’s Cold War Communist treasurers to offer them emergency aid on a massive scale.

They knew, for instance, that Morocco and various other neighbouring African territories were regularly the target of serious seismic and cyclonic weather disruptions, as occurred this month at two different times and places in the Atlas Mountains near Marrakesh and again in Western  Morocco.

Various historians had warned the world after the Agadir earthquake that the North African coastline had, for instance, experienced various devastating natural upheavals over the years.

One of these was a terrifying 6.8 earthquake and resultant tsunami which occurred in 1755. This event was part of Portugal’s “Great Lisbon Devastation” which ran down the bed of the Atlantic Ocean from Southern Europe into Africa, killing up to 50,000 people in Morocco alone and many others elsewhere.

I can only imagine from what happened in Agadir how a relatively large slice of Africa had been instantly turned into a complete moonscape with not a building or tree left standing, let alone any sign of habitation.

The moral of the whole story, of course, is that we human beings are but a very small cog in the workings of the natural world.