On this day — February 23 in African history
Real events, births and milestones from Africa and the diaspora.
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CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons 1763 Enslaved people at Plantation Magdalenenburg rose against their Dutch owners, and the revolt spread across Berbice under a leader known as Cuffy, who declared himself governor and tried to negotiate a partition of the colony. More than 2,500 joined it and they held most of Berbice for the better part of a year before Dutch forces, reinforced from Europe, put it down in 1764. It was the first major slave revolt in South America, and 23 February became Guyana's Republic Day in 1970.
Sources: Atlas Obscura ; Village Voice News
Resistance 
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons 1854 The official independence of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic in what is now South Africa, was declared.
History 
CC BY 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons 1924 Allan McLeod Cormack, South African-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work underpinning CT scanning, was born.
Birth 
CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons 2018 Parliamentary elections were held in Djibouti.
Politics 2020 Ahmaud Arbery was chased through a neighbourhood outside Brunswick, Georgia by two men in a pickup truck, joined by a third who filmed it, and shot dead by Travis McMichael. No one was arrested for 74 days, until the video reached the public. All three were convicted of murder in 2021 and of federal hate crimes the following year.
Sources: US Department of Justice ; CBS News
Diaspora 
CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons 1983 Mido, Egyptian international footballer, was born.
Birth 