The fall of Kwame Nkrumah

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.We start with the launch of Expedition Robinson in Sweden in 1997 and discuss how reality TV began around the world with our guest Misha Kavka, Professor of Cross-Media Culture a ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.We start with the broadcaster and naturalist, Sir David Attenborough. To mark his 100th birthday, we go back to the mid 1950s and the television programme that launched his caree ...  Show more

The Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, was one of Africa's most famous independence leaders. But in 1966, while he was out of the country, the Ghanaian military and police seized power in a coup. The legendary Ghanaian film maker Chris Hesse worked closely with Nkrumah and was wi ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why the potato crop failures in the 1840s had such a catastrophic impact in Ireland. It is estimated that one million people died from disease or starvation after the blight and another two million left the country within the decade. There had been ...  Show more

The assassination of Chris Hani was a pivotal moment in the dismantling of South African apartheid. On the 10th of April, 1993, he was shot dead as he returned to his home in a quiet suburb of Johannesburg. Negotiations between Nelson Mandela's party and the ruling apartheid g ...

How a small Nigerian Islamist group launched one of the deadliest insurgencies in Africa. In 2002, a new radical sect emerged in Maiduguri in north eastern Nigeria led by a charismatic preacher, Mohammed Yusuf. He preached against anything he deemed un-Islamic or having a western ...  Show more