CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons 1937 Edna Adan Ismail, Somaliland's first female foreign minister and a pioneering nurse-midwife and anti-FGM activist, was born in Hargeisa.
BirthOn this day — September 8 in African history
Real events, births and milestones from Africa and the diaspora.
CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons 1937 
Public Domain (U.S. Department of Justice), Wikimedia Commons 1954 Ruby Bridges, who a year later became the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, was born in Tylertown, Mississippi.
Birth
CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons 2023 A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the High Atlas Mountains near Marrakesh, Morocco, killing nearly 3,000 people in the country's deadliest earthquake in over a century.
Tragedy
Collage by Barbudo Barbudo — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons 1925 Spanish forces, including the Foreign Legion under Colonel Francisco Franco, launched an amphibious landing at Al Hoceima in the Rif region of Morocco during the Rif War.
History
Photo via South African History Online — CC0, Wikimedia Commons 1987 Margaret Mary Smith, the South African ichthyologist who co-discovered hundreds of fish species and illustrated the landmark "Sea Fishes of Southern Africa," died in Grahamstown.
DeathAn Egyptian court sentenced 75 people to death and hundreds more to prison terms in a mass trial over the 2013 Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in, a case rights groups condemned as deeply flawed.
Justice