On this day: January 24 in African history

About 600 enslaved and freed Africans, most of them Hausa and Nagô Muslims, rose in Salvador da Bahia during the night, in the last days of Ramadan. Many wore white tunics and carried Qur'anic amulets. The National Guard, the police and armed civilians put the rising down within a day, killing about 80 of the rebels and taking some 300 prisoner, and the leaders were flogged, executed or deported. It was the largest urban slave revolt in the Americas.

Sources: BlackPast ; Harvard Religious Literacy Project

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Boer forces halted a British attempt to break the Siege of Ladysmith at the Battle of Spion Kop, inflicting a costly defeat on British troops during the Second Boer War.

Sources: BritishBattles.com ; Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali Heritage Institute

European settler militants rose in insurrection in Algiers during the week-long episode known as barricades week, erecting barricades and isolating the university quarter to protest French moves toward Algerian self-determination.

Sources: Ministère des Armées (Chemins de mémoire), France ; ASJP / CERIST (Algerian Scientific Journal Platform)

Corrected in September 2026 · see what changed

Thesupermat, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Rokia Traoré, Malian singer-songwriter celebrated for blending traditional Malian instruments with contemporary sounds, was born.

Sources: Library of Congress (LC Name Authority File) ; Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (GND)