Installing Bitcoin node: configure: error: libevent not found.

Installed RHEL 7.5 on DELL Poweredge R230

Installed epel through

$ sudo rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
$ sudo yum update

Installed missing libs (ssl etc.) via yum install ...

Kloned bitcoin from github

$ git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
$ cd bitcoin
$ git checkout v0.17.1

Running autogen & configure...

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --disable-wallet --without-gui --without-miniupnpc

-- ERROR: configure: error: libevent not found.

Even though libevent is allready installed!

How to proceed?

Thx a lot.