On this day — October 25 in African history

Real events, births and milestones from Africa and the diaspora.

Abebe Bikila died at 41 of a brain haemorrhage, four years after a car crash left him paralysed.… Photo by Jack de Nijs, Nationaal Archief — CC0, Wikimedia Commons 1973

Abebe Bikila died at 41 of a brain haemorrhage, four years after a car crash left him paralysed. He had won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome running barefoot in a world best of 2:15:16.2, the first Black African to take an Olympic marathon title, and defended it in Tokyo in 1964 by more than four minutes, forty days after an appendectomy.

Sources: World Athletics ; Olympedia (Olympic results database compiled by the OlyMADMen Olympic historians) ; Olympedia ; Encyclopedia of World Biography (Gale), reprinted at Encyclopedia.com

Death
1973

The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 340, which called for an immediate and complete ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War, a return to the positions held at 1650 GMT on 22 October, and UN observers to monitor the truce; Israel accepted it.

Sources: United Nations ; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian

History