Queen Amina was a warrior and ruler of Zaria, a Hausa city-state in what is now Northern Nigeria. She ruled for 34 years from 1576 until her death in 1610. Queen Amina was born Aminatu around 1533, a member of the royal family. Her grandfather was King Sarkin of Nohir and her grandmother’s name was Marka. Her father was King […]

Maria Mambo Café was an Angolan economist and politician. She was a career member of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho. Café was born in 1945 in Cabinda Province, an exclave of Angola in the northern part of the country. She earned a degree in economics in the Soviet Union in 1968 and later returned […]

Bibi Titi Mohammed was a Tanzanian politician and activist. She was born in June 1926 in Dar es Salaam, then the capital of the British colony of Tanganyika. Mohammed was a member of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the party that fought for Tanzanian independence and she supported Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania. After independence she held […]

Lewis Chitengwa was a Zimbabwean golfer who in 1993 became the first black person to win the South African Amateur Championship. Chitengwa was born on January 25, 1975, to Lewis Muridzo and an unnamed mother in Harare, Zimbabwe. Chitengwa’s father was an accomplished golf professional from Wingate Golf Club in Harare. He also had four other siblings: two sisters, Helga […]

Johnnie B. “Dusty” Baker Jr. is currently the baseball manager of the Houston Astros and a former major league player. Baker was born on June 15, 1949, to Johnnie B. Baker Sr. and Christine Baker in Riverside, California. Growing up, Baker played various sports, including baseball and basketball. When he was 14, his family moved to Sacramento, California. Baker attended […]

The case of the Jena Six exposed racial injustice and inequality following an incident involving six male African American teenagers. The arrest of the students, all enrolled at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, ignited a national movement to address longstanding injustices in what has often been referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline” of policies and practices that push at-risk […]

Orchestral pianist, violinist, conductor, composer, and arranger of the Swing to Bebop eras, Teddy Wilson was born Theodore Shaw Wilson on November 24, 1912, in Austin, Texas. He and his brother Gus Wilson, however, were reared on the campus of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), Alabama, as his father, James Wilson, was chairperson of the English department, and his mother, […]

Deion Luwynn Sanders is a college football coach, former professional football player, and baseball player. Sanders was born on August 9, 1967, to Connie and Mims Sanders in Fort Myers, Florida. Sanders’s parents divorced when he was two years old and his mother married Willie Knight, who became his stepfather. Sanders became involved with organized baseball and football at the […]

Cape Verde independence activist, women’s rights activist, and pharmacist Isaura Tavares Gomes was born on February 22, 1944, in Santiago, Praia, Sotavento Islands, Cabo Verde (Cape Verde), one of the smallest nations globally, comprising ten islands and five islets off the western coast of the African continent, near Senegal. Cape Verde is a former Portuguese colony which received independence in […]

Thérèse Sita-Bella, born Thérèse Bella Mbida in 1933, was a Cameroonian film director who is widely acknowledged as the first female filmmaker in Africa. She was born to the Beti tribe in southern Cameroon, then a French colony, and received her education from Catholic missionaries. In the 1950s, after graduating from school in the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé, she went […]