Ceiling of Debre Birhan Selassie church, Gondar, Ethiopia. Photo: Rod Waddington, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence · Source
Real events, births and milestones from Africa and the diaspora.
Ludwig Wegmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons 1963 Sylvanus Olympio, the first President of Togo, was assassinated in a military coup, one of the first violent overthrows of an independent African government.
Sources: Africa at LSE ; Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read the full article: The 1963 Togo Coup: Africa's First and the Killing of Sylvanus Olympio
PoliticsA passenger train plunged into a ravine in Ethiopia's Awash Valley, killing 428 people in what remains the worst railroad disaster in African history.
Sources: UPI ; Agence France-Presse (AFP), via Getty Images archive
TragedyGhanaian Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia and President Edward Akufo-Addo were ousted in a bloodless military coup led by Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong.
Sources: Britannica ; Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (Country Studies series)
Read the full article: Kofi Busia's Government Overthrown in Ghana's 1972 Coup
Politics
US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons 1966 Robert C. Weaver was appointed U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, becoming the first African American member of a presidential cabinet.
Sources: Miller Center, University of Virginia ; The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara ; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD Archives)
Politics
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons 1990 Douglas Wilder was inaugurated as Governor of Virginia, becoming the first elected African American governor in U.S. history.
Sources: Library of Virginia, Document Bank of Virginia ; Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities)
Politics
OIST, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons 1927 Sydney Brenner, South African biologist and Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of molecular biology, was born (died 2019).
Sources: The Nobel Prize ; South African History Online ; Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Science
COP Paris, CC0, Wikimedia Commons 1959 Winnie Byanyima, Ugandan engineer, politician, and longtime executive director of Oxfam International, was born.
Sources: UNAIDS ; Africa Confidential
Birth