Witness History

On 13 June 1964, Nelson Mandela, who later became South Africa's president, was taken to the maximum security prison on Robben Island off the coast of South Africa. Mandela had led the military wing of the African National Congress party which was banned by the apartheid government. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent 18 years on the island before being transferred to prison on the mai...

On 10 March 1994, Italian author Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water was published. It features Inspector Montalbano in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigàta. The novel is widely credited with helping start a new wave of Italian noir. It is the first book in a series that has had worldwide sales of 25 million and has been translated into 120 languages. Jen Dale uses BBC Archive to tell the story...

One month before the bloodshed in Beijing, a 10km line of protestors snaked through the city. For over a decade China had been opening up to global trade and there was promise that, with greater economic freedoms, democratic rights might be within reach too. In an emotional testimony, student organiser Wu'er Kaixi explains why he thought protest and demonstrations were encouraging leaders towards...

In 1963, a giant Scotsman sculpture appeared outside the Scotty Motel in Adelaide, in South Australia. A banana, a koala, and even a potato soon followed, paving the way for the country’s beloved Big Things - one of Australia’s quirkiest cultural phenomena. Paul Kelly was the artist behind both the Big Scotsman and the equally iconic Big Lobster. He and his daughter, Christobel Kelly, tell Stefani...

In 1996, Ireland launched its first television channel broadcasting exclusively in the Irish language. Teilifís na Gaeilge, later renamed TG4, went on air on Halloween night. It aimed to appeal to both native and non-native speakers. The launch followed decades of campaigning for more Irish-language broadcasting in the country. Sinéad Ní Ghuidhir was the first presenter to speak on the new station...

In the 1950s, Dutch journalist Willem Sassen recorded hours of interview with the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann about his involvement in the Holocaust, before his capture in Argentina by Israeli agents. Willem's daughter Saskia Sassen tells Louise Hidalgo about the tapes, her memories of their secret visitor and the night the Israelis snatched Eichmann off the streets of Buenos Aires. This prog...

In 1997, Titanic, one of the most successful films in movie history, and one of the most expensive, was made in Mexico.   The director James Cameron and his production team built an almost full-size replica of the ship in Rosarito, Baja California, in the world’s biggest water tank. Over the seven-month shoot, the budget soared to more than $200m, and there were worries about recouping costs. But...

Just before dawn, on 19 November 1984, an explosion at a gas plant in San Juanico, Mexico killed hundreds of people, injured thousands and destroyed buildings. Virginia Martínez Tellez was a young teenager at the time and talks to Jen Dale about how she and her family escaped the intense heat and fire of what's considered one of the world's deadliest industrial gas accidents. This programme contai...

In October 2014, indigenous women in Mexico won a landmark victory in their struggle for political rights. It came after years of campaigning by Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, a Zapotec woman who had been prevented from becoming mayor of her local community. She believed a system of special laws, allowing indigenous communities to self-govern with their own traditions, had allowed men to maintain their p...

In July 2000 an historic election in Mexico saw a change of government for the first time in 71 years. Vicente Fox of the National Action Party was elected president, defeating the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had held power since 1929. Marketing strategist Francisco Ortiz worked on the Fox campaign. He speaks to Helen Ledwick about an election many thought impossible. Eye-witness acco...

In 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close, the Mexican love song Besame Mucho crossed the Atlantic and became one of the most recognisable melodies of the post-war era. Its lyrics were daring for the time: an open plea for a passionate kiss. The song had been written years earlier by Consuelo Velazquez, a young woman who composed romantic melodies for pleasure but kept her authorship a secre...

In 2000, contaminated drinking water in the small Canadian town of Walkerton triggered one of the country’s worst public health disasters. Heavy rainfall washed E. coli bacteria into the town’s water supply, but failures in testing and reporting meant residents continued to drink the water. Seven people died and thousands fell ill. Megan Lawton speaks to resident Bruce Davidson who experienced the...

Montenegro achieving independence from Serbia in 2006 was the final part of the break-up of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Montenegro and Serbia had been joined since the end of the First World War, but after other Yugoslav countries broke away in the 1990s, an independence movement began to grow. In 2006, the people of the small European nation went to the polls and narrowly...

In 1999, a teenager's debut book unintentionally caused a royal scandal in Belgium that wouldn't be resolved for more than 20 years. Each evening after he'd finished his homework, Mario Danneels dedicated his spare time writing a biography of Queen Paola. While researching her, he'd discovered that her husband, King Albert II, had fathered a child outside of his marriage. It was just one sentence...

In 1981, Poland's communist regime imposed martial law and the dissident Solidarity movement was suppressed. In response, Helena Luczywo helped set up an underground newspaper called Mazovia Weekly to communicate uncensored information to the population. Despite police raids and arrests, the newspaper played a significant role in the fall of communism in Poland. Helena tells Ben Henderson about th...

In 1980, Norway’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest included a traditional Sami joik song from the country’s indigenous community. It was the first time joiking was heard by an international audience. The song was originally created by Mattis Haetta as part of a protest against the building of a dam in Finnmark, in northern Norway – which would have flooded traditional Sami reindeer herding rou...

In 1997, Sweden changed television history. That year saw the launch of Expedition Robinson, widely regarded as the world’s first reality-based competitive television programme. The premise was strikingly simple. A group of ordinary people were stranded on a remote island, where they were required to build shelter, compete in challenges and vote one another out — until only one contestant remained...

In 1996, the bricklayer renovating Merced dos Anjos’ home in Rio de Janeiro told her something strange had happened. Bones appeared as he was breaking ground. As she inspected the site, she found they were human. But why so many bones? Was it the work of a serial killer? The answer was more macabre. They had unearthed an ancient cemetery. The discovery shed light on the brutal history of Brazil’s...

In 1996, a fossil unearthed in China became the first confirmed record of a dinosaur covered in feathers. Before this discovery, some palaeontologists had suggested that dinosaurs might have developed feathers and eventually evolved into modern birds, but the idea remained controversial due to the lack of concrete evidence. Canadian palaeontologist Philip Currie was among the first experts to exam...

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a seven-year project which examined the country’s residential school system. For more than 100 years, Indigenous children were taken from their families to boarding schools with the sole purpose to “kill the Indian in the child”. The schools were run by various church organisations on behalf of the Canadian government, and many children were subject...

In 1954, the BBC broadcast a new television programme in the United Kingdom. It was called Zoo Quest and it launched the career of a man who has since brought the natural world into millions of homes around the world, the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough. In 2021, Louise Hidalgo dove into the BBC archives to hear Sir David tell the story of the first natural history expedition for Zoo Quest - th...

On 9 May 2001, 127 people died and dozens more were injured at the Accra Stadium in Ghana. It is Africa's worst football stadium tragedy. The disaster happened at the end of a match between Asante Kotoko and Hearts of Oak. Police fired tear gas after angry fans threw chairs onto the pitch. It caused a stampede. Herbert Mensah was the Asante Kotoko chairman at the time and speaks to Jen Dale about...

On 12 August 1990, the world's most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found in South Dakota. Deena Newman speaks to Peter Larson whose team made the landmark discovery. This programme was first broadcast in 2015. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world thr...

In May 1942, a team of Norwegian resistance fighters in occupied Norway were getting ready to blow up a railway carrying materials crucial to the German war machine. Led by Lieutenant Peter Deinboll, a local from the area, they set out to execute what the Allied forces saw as the top priority sabotage operation in Norway at that stage in the war. Should they fail, allied planes would carpet bomb t...

In the early 1990s, Algeria was engulfed by a brutal civil conflict, as armed Islamist groups fought the state and civilians lived in fear. Foreigners were urged to leave, and many did. But Sister Lourdes Migueles, a Spanish Augustinian nun who had already spent decades serving in Algeria, chose to stay. As the violence worsened, religious figures also became targets. In October 1994, two of Siste...