On this day — January 3 in African history

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Joseph Jenkins Roberts was sworn in as the first President of Liberia, becoming the first African American to lead an independent African republic.

A protest by agricultural workers in Baixa de Cassanje, Portuguese Angola, escalated into revolt, opening the Angolan War of Independence, the first of the Portuguese Colonial Wars.

Simon Butler — CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Flash Airlines Flight 604 crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, killing all 148 people on board.

Boko Haram militants razed the town of Baga in northeastern Nigeria, in one of the deadliest massacres of the insurgency, killing hundreds of civilians.

Joy Adamson, Austrian-born Kenyan naturalist and author of Born Free, was killed near Shaba National Reserve in Kenya after decades of pioneering lion conservation work.

U.S. Congress — Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Edward Brooke, the first African American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate, died at age 95.

A general strike and popular uprising in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) forced President Maurice Yaméogo to resign, and the military under Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana took power.