Witness History

Sixty years ago, on 21 February 1965, the controversial black leader, Malcolm X, was assassinated in Harlem, New York as he was preparing to speak there. In 2011, Simon Watts spoke to Herman Ferguson who was one of the people who was in the audience that day. This programme contains outdated racial language that may offend. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for th...

On 29 March 1974, Czesław Kukuczka stormed into the Polish embassy in East Berlin, threatening to detonate a bomb unless he was allowed to escape to the West. Shot at point-blank range while trying to cross the Berlin Wall, the identity of Kukuczka's killer remained a mystery for decades - until archive documents led investigators to former Stasi officer Martin Naumann. Naumann's historic trial ma...

In December 2005, Evo Morales made history in Bolivia when he became the country’s first indigenous president. The country is one of the poorest in South America and has the highest proportion of indigenous people on the continent – they had been marginalised for centuries. His election came after years of protests over the destruction of coca leaf crops and the privatisation of the country's oil...

In 2010, one of the oldest languages in the world died after the death of its last remaining speaker. For 40 years, Boa Senior from the Indian Andaman Islands was the only person who spoke the Bo language. She died, aged 85. Leading up to her death, linguist Professor Anvita Abbi spent years attempting to learn the dying language. Without family or friends who understood her, Boa took to speaking...

In 2013, Guinness World Records deactivated the record for the longest kiss after 15 years, saying it had become too dangerous and some of the rules conflicted with their current updated policies. It means Thai couple Ekkachai, and his wife Laksana, still hold the title, after first breaking it in 2011, with a time of 46 hours and 24 minutes, then again in 2013 with 58 hours and 35 minutes. The co...

Eva Peron – otherwise known as Evita - became an icon in 1940s Argentina, famous for her passionate speeches and populist rhetoric. Born into poverty, she moved to Buenos Aries at the age of 15 to become an actress, and was soon starring in radio soap operas. In 1945, she married Colonel Juan Peron, a rising figure in the Argentinian military, and supported his campaign to become president. After...

On 10 December 1992, Australia’s Prime Minister, Paul Keating, addressed a crowd in a Sydney suburb called Redfern, to mark the UN’s International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. What started as a low-key affair, is remembered as one of the most powerful speeches in Australian history. It was the first time an Australian Prime Minister took moral responsibility for the horrors committed aga...

When Mary Fisher was diagnosed with HIV in 1991 she did not represent the typical stereotype of someone HIV-positive. She was white, heterosexual and contracted the disease in marriage. She used her platform at the Republican National Convention in Texas in 1992 to try and change people's treatment of those carrying the Aids virus. The speech was broadcast live to millions of people via the major...

In January 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower ended his time in the White House with a farewell address regarded as one of the greatest speeches made by a US president. He warned Americans against the "military-industrial complex", a phrase that he coined. In 2018, Louise Hidalgo looked back on the speech with Dwight Eisenhower's grandson, David Eisenhower, and one of his speechwriters, Stephen...

Dolores Ibárruri was nicknamed La Pasionaria for her fiery speeches to the anti-fascist forces during the Spanish civil war. The fighting had begun in July 1936. Troops, led by General Francisco Franco, launched an uprising against the democratically-elected government. These Nationalist rebels were backed by Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. On the other side were supporters...

In 1989, a dark teen comedy exploring self-harm and suicide flopped at cinemas. Heathers would have to wait years before achieving cult status through home video tape releases. Its stark portrayal of teenage life launched an age of more radical teen movies. Actress Lisanne Falk played one of the ‘Heathers’, a titular trio of girls who ruled their school, until someone started taking them down. She...

In 1998, a mysterious phenomenon turned many of the world’s most colourful coral reefs deathly white. It was the first recorded global coral bleaching event in history, and ecologists blamed it on rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change. Studies showed that when the oceans get warmer, it stresses the corals, causing them to expel the algae that give them their colour, and so turn white....

In the early 1990s, as Cuba faced a devastating economic crisis, leading to severe food shortages and malnutrition, around 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss. One of America's leading eye specialists, Dr Alfredo Sadun, was invited to the communist-ruled island by Fidel Castrol to help figure out what was going on. Mike Lanchin spoke to Dr Sadun in 2021. Eye-witness account...

In June 1944, a village in France was destroyed in just one day. German soldiers entered Oradour-sur-Glane and gathered the villagers together. They separated the men from the women and children and took groups to different locations of the village. On that day, 642 were killed. Robert Hébras was just a teenager at the time. Robert’s granddaughter, Agathe Hébras tells Gill Kearsley his powerful st...

In 1966, at Johns Hopkins University in the US, a little-known glamorous French philosopher called Jacques Derrida took to the stage and eviscerated the prevailing philosophy of the day, making him an overnight sensation. The following year, he published three hugely influential books making the case for his theory of “deconstruction”, which questioned the foundations of Western thought and knowle...

In 1981 the first major series of English lessons was broadcast on Chinese television. President Deng Xiaoping had allowed private enterprise and was pursuing an era of “opening up” to the rest of the world. It followed a decade of educational turmoil when teachers had been castigated as bourgeois by the former leader Mao Zedong. Kathy Flower presented the English education programme, Follow Me, s...

A series of unprecedented teachers’ strikes temporarily shut most of New York’s schools in the late 1960s, provoked by an ongoing dispute over whether parents could have a say in the running of their children’s schools. ‘Community control’ over the city’s schools was a divisive issue at the time, part of the civil rights and Black Power movement, in the USA. Linda Mannheim spoke to Monifa Edwards,...

In the aftermath of World War Two, children were left orphaned, or separated from their families. They were forced to flee East Prussia when the Red Army advanced. Whilst trying to survive, on their way to Lithuania, they were likened to hungry wolves roaming through forests. Now aged 84, 'wolf child' Luise Quitsch tells Megan Jones about her journey and what life was like growing up in Lithuania....

On 23 August 1989, approximately two million people joined hands to form a 690-kilometre human chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was a key moment in the protests in Eastern Europe that became known as the Singing Revolution. In 2010, Damien McGuinness spoke to MEP Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian organiser of the event. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for...

On 16 March 1988, loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone killed three mourners and injured 60 others attending a funeral for IRA members killed in Gibraltar. The so-called Gibraltar Three had been shot dead by the British Army and brought home to Belfast to be buried in the city’s Catholic Milltown Cemetery. American journalist Bill Buzenberg, who was covering the funeral for National Public Radio in...

In August 1995, Microsoft released a new operating system - Windows 95 – following one of the computer industry’s biggest and most expensive marketing campaigns. Queues formed outside shops at midnight as people around the world waited to be among the first to buy it. The new software was designed to be more user friendly, easier to understand and aimed at ordinary people not professional programm...

On 29 November 1995, Tibetan Buddhist leaders attended a secret ceremony in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. They were present to witness the choice of the next Panchen Lama, a position in Tibetan Buddhism second in importance to the Dalai Lama. They were met by Chinese armed guards, sent to ensure Chinese influence over the choice of Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama's choice of Panchen Lama had been kidna...

On 27 March 1995, fashion heir Maurizio Gucci was shot dead outside his office in Milan, Italy. Five people, including his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, and her clairvoyant, were jailed in connection with his murder. The media called it the 'trial of the century'. Rachel Naylor speaks to Carmine Gallo, the police officer who cracked the case. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness...

In 1995, an obscure Japanese religion launched a chemical attack on the Tokyo metro. Members of the doomsday cult, which called itself Aum Shinrikyo, dropped plastic bags containing sarin liquid on the floors of five different trains and then pierced them. As the liquid evaporated, passengers began inhaling the deadly fumes. Thirteen people were killed and thousands more injured. One of the passen...

During a 17-year bombing campaign, an elusive terrorist known as the Unabomber killed three and injured 23 Americans. In 1995, he contacted The New York Times and The Washington Post promising to stop his terror attacks if they published his 35,000-word manifesto. The document explained his aim: to dismantle modern industrial society. On the advice of the FBI and the Attorney General, the newspape...