Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.
We’re going wild for animals this week. We find out how the Ibadan Zoo became one of Nigeria’s biggest tourist attractions during the 1970s. Our guest Harriet Ritvo, professor of history at MIT, looks back across the centuries to reveal the fascination that humans have always had for animals. And more on the environmental campaigner who became known as Lady Tarzan for her fight against illegal logging in the forests of India.
Plus, we hear from a journalist tortured in Iran's notorious Evin Prison in the wake of the 2009 protests against the Islamic regime. Also, why hundreds of thousands of Moroccans were ordered into the Spanish Sahara by their king. And finally, more on the Bolivian president who went on hunger strike to try to save his country.
Contributors: Peaches Golding - wife of zoologist Bob Golding Professor Harriet Ritvo – professor of history at MIT Marcela Siles - daughter of former Bolivian president Hernán Siles Zuazo Seddik Maaninou - TV cameraman Francis Gillies – North Africa expert Maziar Bahari - journalist Jamuna Tudu – environmentalist nicknamed ‘Lady Tarzan’
(Photo: Imade the gorilla at Ibadan Zoo. Credit: bobgolding.co.uk)
The Zanzibar revolution
The Gwangju massacre
Britain's World War Two crime wave
Fighting for the pill in Japan
VE Day Special
The 1957 flu pandemic
The last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade
Apollo 13: The drama that gripped the world
How technology revolutionised our lives
Women in the law
The AIDS memorial quilt - a patchwork of loss
The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope
The 1918 'Spanish' flu pandemic
The history of the Volkswagen Beetle
Freeing American prisoners from Iran
Saving Antarctica
The publication of Harry Potter
London's first black policeman
The early days of the European Union
The mystery of the disappearing frogs
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