On this day — August 23 in African history

Herbert Bankole-Bright, a physician and political activist who helped found Sierra Leone's first political party, was born in the Niger Delta region.

UNESCO's International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition was established for August 23, marking the anniversary of the 1791 Saint-Domingue slave uprising.

Napoleon Bonaparte secretly left Egypt for France, abandoning the army he had led there, en route to seizing power in a coup.

Eugene Bullard, the only African-American combat pilot of World War I, was posthumously commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the US Air Force.

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Libyan rebel forces overran Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli, effectively ending his four-decade rule during the Libyan Civil War.

Augusta Chiwy, the Congolese-Belgian nurse whose heroism treating wounded soldiers during the World War II Battle of the Bulge went unrecognized for decades, died at 94.