Wilson Dias/ABr, CC BY 3.0 br, Wikimedia Commons 1999 President Joao Bernardo Vieira of Guinea-Bissau was ousted in a military coup.
Sources: Security Council Report ; U.S. Department of State ; BBC News
Politics
Ceiling of Debre Birhan Selassie church, Gondar, Ethiopia. Photo: Rod Waddington, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence · Source
On this day: May 7 in African history
Real events, births and milestones from Africa and the diaspora.
Wilson Dias/ABr, CC BY 3.0 br, Wikimedia Commons 1999 An EgyptAir Boeing 737 crashed on approach to Tunis-Carthage International Airport, killing 14 people.
Sources: Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives ; ABC News
History
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons 1946 Herbert Macaulay, Nigerian journalist and politician regarded as a founding father of Nigerian nationalism, died.
Sources: Central Bank of Nigeria ; BlackPast.org
Death
Willy Pragher, CC BY 3.0 de, Wikimedia Commons 1998 Allan McLeod Cormack, the South African-born physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for developing the theory behind CT scanning, died.
Sources: The Nobel Prize (Nobel Foundation) ; National Library of Medicine (PMC), Singapore Medical Journal
DeathEskender, who reigned as Emperor of Ethiopia, died.
Sources: E. A. Wallis Budge, A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia (Internet Archive scan) ; Edward Ullendorff, The Ethiopians (Oxford University Press; Internet Archive scan)
Corrected in September 2026 · see what changed
Death