On this day — September 13 in African history

Byzantine general Belisarius decisively defeated the Vandal Kingdom at the Battle of Ad Decimum near Carthage in North Africa.

Sources: LacusCurtius, University of Chicago ; World History Encyclopedia ; Encyclopaedia Britannica

Garnet Wolseley's army crossed the desert at night and overran the Egyptian entrenchments at Tel el-Kebir at dawn. About 2,000 Egyptians were killed against 57 British. The battle ended Ahmed Urabi's movement and began a British occupation of Egypt that lasted until 1956.

Sources: The Past ; OnWar

Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a starving child during the Sudan famine, was born in Johannesburg.

Sources: The New York Times ; The Guardian

Desmond Tutu led an anti-apartheid march through Cape Town in which about 30,000 people walked from St George's Cathedral to the City Hall, the city's biggest protest in 30 years.

Sources: Apartheid Museum ; South African Government

Photo by /\ \/\/ /\ — CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

A U.S. federal district court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, who became the first African American student at the segregated university.

Sources: Justia (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) ; National Black Law Journal (UCLA)

South Africa's apartheid government granted nominal 'independence' to the Bantustan of Venda, a designation not recognized by any country outside South Africa.

Sources: Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal (PER/PELJ) ; South African History Online ; The New York Times

Photo by Ssunaronald — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Salva Kiir Mayardit, the former SPLA commander who became the first president of South Sudan upon its independence in 2011, was born in Akon, Bahr el Ghazal.

Sources: BlackPast.org ; BBC News ; Encyclopaedia Britannica

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Alain Locke, philosopher and the first Black Rhodes Scholar, who became known as the intellectual architect of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Philadelphia.

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ; Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University