Sir David Attenborough's first Zoo Quest and a WW2 sabotage mission in Norway

9 May 2026 · 1 h 1 min · 21 chapters

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

The episode (BBC History Hour) links multiple “Witness History” stories. First, it marks Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday by revisiting his first ZooQuest expedition: in late 1954, Attenborough (28), with London Zoo zoologists Jack Lester and Alf Woods and cameraman Charles Lagos, traveled to Sierra Leone to find and film the white-necked Picathartes (bald-headed rock crow).

Key claims

ZooQuest was the first natural history expedition for Attenborough; the “quest” hook was chosen to attract viewers; the first broadcast succeeded even after Lester fell ill, with Attenborough stepping in on camera.

Notable examples

the team’s first Europeans-ever sighting of Picathartes on its nest; the program’s popularity through 1963.

Guests

Dr Paula Kahumbu, Kenyan conservationist and head of Wildlife Direct. Also featured: Gunnar Deinboll Jensen (family member) and Lars Bavanger (storyteller); Sister Lourdes Migueles (Algerian civil war account); Dina Newman (interviewing fossil hunter Peter Larson); Herbert Mensah (Ghana 2001 stadium disaster); Tim O’Callaghan and Enafiok “Eni” Udo Obong (Nigeria 4x400m relay doping reversal).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Celebrating David Attenborough

2:52 to 4:00

Exploration of David Attenborough's impact on wildlife broadcasting and his early works.

“The past brought to life by those who were there.”

The Quest for the Picathartes

4:00 to 6:01

Attenborough recounts his first expedition to find the white-necked Picathartes in Sierra Leone.

“It was drawn from some preserved skins that were sent to the British Museum many years ago from Sierra Leone in West Africa.”

The Birth of Zoo Quest

6:01 to 12:12

The creation of Zoo Quest and its significance in wildlife television history.

“First, though, he had to find a cameraman.”

Attenborough's Legacy

12:12 to 12:30

Discussion of David Attenborough's enduring influence on wildlife documentaries.

“Sir David Attenborough, of course, went on to present landmark natural history series like Life on Earth, Blue Planet and Planet Earth.”

Modern Wildlife Filmmaking

12:30 to 14:00

Dr. Paula Kahumbu discusses the evolution of wildlife filmmaking and its impact.

“and head of Wildlife Direct, a conservation organisation.”

The Impact of Wildlife Filmmaking

14:00 to 16:39

Learn how wildlife films influence conservation and tourism.

“And I think that's shifting dramatically.”

Norwegian Sabotage During WWII

16:40 to 22:28

Discover the daring sabotage mission of Norwegian resistance fighters.

“Next, we've got a gripping story of strategic sabotage from the Second World War.”

Consequences of Resistance

22:29 to 24:56

Explore the aftermath and legacy of the sabotage operations.

“My mother came with information, intelligence.”

Tragedy at the Stadium: A Harrowing Account

28:00 to 34:40

Listeners will learn about a devastating stadium disaster in Ghana and its aftermath.

“It was a late winning goal from the home team Hearts of Oak, which brought rival fans to their feet in the Accra Stadium and set the scene for the tragedy that followed.”

Introduction to Algeria's Civil War

34:40 to 35:18

The segment provides context on Algeria's civil conflict known as the Black Decade.

“Herbert Mensah, one-time chairman of Kotoko Football Club, is now president of Rugby Africa.”
Show all 21 chapters

Sister Lourdes: A Call to Stay

35:18 to 39:50

Listeners will hear Sister Lourdes' decision to remain in Algeria during a violent civil war.

“Then they shouted, Lourdes, Lourdes, Lourdes.”

The Aftermath of Violence: Loss and Return

39:50 to 42:00

The segment explores the emotional and societal impacts of violence in Algeria and Sister Lourdes' return.

“And we wanted to stay with the church as well, because the church had been greatly diminished.”

Sister Lourdes' Return to Algeria

42:00 to 43:53

Learn about Sister Lourdes' commitment to rebuilding in Algeria after violence.

“They were killed about 100 metres from here.”

Discovery of the T-Rex Skeleton

43:53 to 46:55

Uncover the exciting story behind the discovery of a complete T-Rex skeleton.

“Finally, a story to gladden the hearts of fossil hunters everywhere.”

Legal Troubles Over Sue the T-Rex

46:55 to 50:59

Explore the legal battles surrounding the ownership of the T-Rex fossil.

“This was an individual animal that lived.”

Sue the T-Rex's Journey to a Museum

50:59 to 52:18

Follow the path of Sue the T-Rex to her display at the Field Museum.

“To everyone's relief, Sue the T-Rex was purchased by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.”

Nigerian 4x400m Relay Team's Journey

52:35 to 56:00

Learn about the dramatic story of the Nigerian relay team's Olympic experience.

“Now, they say that justice delayed is justice denied, and that applies in sport just as it does in criminal law.”

Eni's Race Experience

56:00 to 58:11

Learn about Eni's experience and emotions during a pivotal relay race.

“It was a crowd, and he had come up with these new golden shoes, and everybody wanted to see Johnson and take a picture of him.”

Medal Controversy Aftermath

58:11 to 1:00:02

Explore the unfolding controversy over Olympic medal distribution due to doping.

“One of the Americans, Jerome Young, tested positive for a band substance.”

Recognition and Reflection

1:00:02 to 1:01:14

Discuss the formal recognition of the Nigerian team and its implications.

“we were hoping that we would be invited to London at the Olympics and then have the medal presented to us in front of the crowd, which would have been much better.”

Philosophical Insights on Doping

1:01:14 to 1:01:42

Eni shares his thoughts on doping and its impact on sports discussions.

“If we just won the gold it probably would have been almost a forgotten story.”
Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:29CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bull spend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Make Mother's Day even more special at Whole Foods Market. Kick off brunch or dinner with quality cheese and charcuterie with no synthetic nitrates.

1:19Then go seafood. There's an abundance on sale at Whole Foods Market, where it's all sustainable while cod or responsibly farmed. At the bakery, grab seasonal treats like their strawberry pretzel cream pie, and you can't go wrong with a ready-to-heat quiche Lorraine, deviled eggs, and fresh-cut fruits to go. Celebrate mom with Whole Foods Market. A moment in time captured by what they heard. I heard some people making phone calls. Okay, which runway would you like at Teterboro? We're going to get that. What they saw. I put my head down. I saw the movie of my life. It started going through my head.

1:52What they smelt. I still remember the smell of the fresh fish. And I completely lost my appetite. Moments captured which last for a lifetime. Scientists have made the atomic bomb. That sort of flash set on fire the birds and they all fell down without their feathers on. The way was clear for Hitler to realise all his demonic plans. Stories from people with first-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world. At the end, Kissinger called me into his office and he said he did a good job. I left the office with tears in my eyes. She called me and told me, I'm doing Studio 54. She had already become a star in Paris.

2:38She came back a superstar. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

2:51Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson. The past brought to life by those who were there. This week, a daring Second World War sabotage mission in Norway. He waited for the blast to go off and nothing happened. And there were guards there, you know, he had to crawl back. When he almost got to the door, it all exploded. We'll also hear firsthand what it was like to be caught in the middle of Algeria's civil war, plus Africa's worst ever stadium disaster. We didn't have a choice. You either get in there to save people, or you just go away and read it on the news.

3:29And we'll go fossil hunting in America on a gigantic scale. But first, we celebrate a true broadcasting great. The 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough is being marked around the world by special events highlighting the impact his TV programmes have had on our understanding of wildlife and the world around us. As Luis Hidalgo uncovered from the archives, it all began with a show called ZooQuest back in the 1950s. That is the picture of a very rare bird, the white-necked Picathartes. It was drawn from some preserved skins that were sent to the British Museum many years ago from Sierra Leone in West Africa.

4:12In late 1954, Sir David Attenborough went to Sierra Leone with two zoologists and a cameraman to try to find that tropical bird, the white-necked Picathartes, and bring it back to England. It was the first ever natural history expedition for the man who'd go on to become the godfather of nature programmes. And years later, he'd describe it in a series of BBC interviews. I was very anxious to get into the tropics as a naturalist. I yearned to see it. And I had already done programmes with people from the London Zoo. And there was a lovely man there called Jack Lester who was in charge of the reptiles.

4:48And he and I cooked up the idea that the London Zoo might send a collecting expedition to go and collect more reptiles, particularly snakes and birds. I said that if the zoo would do that, I would like to come with a camera and get permission of the BBC to film how it was done. David Attenborough was then 28 and had never travelled outside Europe. He told the BBC presenter John McCarthy in 2009 how he'd broached the idea with his bosses. I simply said, look, I'd like to go to West Africa. And they said, how long for? And I said, well, it'll be about three or four months. And they said, and what will you do?

5:25And I said, well, I think I'll bring back enough film for some programmes. How many? Well, about six. Oh, that'll be fine. Well, good afternoon. How much money do you want? And I remember actually how much money we did want. I said it'll cost£1 ,000. Good Lord. And they said,£1 ,000? How can you possibly justify that? Well, I said, it'll be£300 for the fares, so we'll need£300 to spend on film stock, and then£300 for food and this and that, you know, and incidentals. And so if you could chuck in the extra 100 in order to buy my khaki shorts and my mosquito net, they'll record at£1 ,000, which is they did, and off we went.

6:01First, though, he had to find a cameraman. And I heard that there was an amateur cameraman, a young chap, who was very good on 16mm cameras. So I discovered his name, which was Charles Lagos, and I said, look, I'm going to West Africa. Would you be at all interested in coming? And he said, well, I might. And he did. I met this young man called Attenborough, who nobody had ever heard of before. We seemed to hit it off straight away. Charles Lagos was a Czech photographer, a couple of years younger than David Attenborough. And like David Attenborough, that expedition would launch his career as a natural history cinematographer.

6:40David Attenborough decided that the programmes they'd make from the trip needed a hook, something to draw viewers in, something they had to find, which is where the bird came in. I said to Jack Lester, couldn't we make it a quest for something? Isn't this something that nobody's ever seen before live? Jack Lester said, what about the bird, the Picathartes gymnocephalus? And I said, yeah, well, Jack, you see, I mean, a quest for Picothartes gymnocephalus is not a winning title. Hasn't he got another name? He said, oh, yeah, a bald-headed rock crow. And I said, well, even a quest for a bald-headed rock crow is not, you know, a crowd pleaser particularly.

7:20I don't want to drag him in. So then we just called it Zoo Quest. And so, in late 1954, the four of them, David Attenborough, Jack Lester and his colleague Alf Woods of London Zoo, and the cameraman Charles Lagos set off for Sierra Leone. David Attenborough never forgot that moment he stepped off the plane into the hot tropical West African air for the first time. I remember very clearly walking across the grass strip and then I saw something moving. It was a chameleon. I thought, chameleon in a hedge. And there was a mantis. And I was suddenly struck by the huge proliferation of life, which is characteristic of the tropics.

7:59And that tropical air, not only loaded with moisture, but loaded with smells from the earth and from the forest. But distances in Sierra Leone are not only measured in miles, they're also measured in rivers and the slow, hand-pulled ferries that cross them. And the ferrymen, being the biggest gossips in the area, were just the people to tell us if anyone had caught any animals recently and to pass on the extraordinary news to all travelling along the road that a party of Englishmen were willing to buy animals of all sorts and were offering rewards to anyone who could show them the nests of some extraordinarily bald-headed bird.

8:38It is an interesting bird and nobody had seen it before but it really wasn't the point of the thing. The point of the thing was to show how a zoo went about collecting animals. I should add perhaps that zoos wouldn't do that now. We're talking about 1954. Then we thought that the natural world was healthy, full of animals. If an animal died in a zoo, well, you simply went out and got another. You don't do that anymore. Here, life is carried on in a very different way. Villages are dotted by the side of creeks and lagoons, and each one is surrounded by groves of coconut palms. That was the first portable tape recorder in existence.

9:19It was a huge thing. And none of the people we met had ever seen or heard a tape recorder before. They didn't really believe that what was in the box was able to record this. I played one piece, a very nice, this Balangi, a West African xylophone, and a very good player. He was a virtuoso, and he listened to it very critically, and he said, oh, yeah. But that was an easy piece. That would be easy for it to learn. I'll now play something really difficult and see what it does then. So he then played a real virtuoso piece, very, very fast and so on, And he was astounded when he discovered that my little green box could even reproduce that.

10:00As the team travelled, they collected the animals they'd come for, but there was still no sign of Picathartes gymnocephalus, until, deep in the jungle, they finally clothed in on them, a pair of this rarely seen exotic bird. We took our places behind the hide, and from it we had a clear view of the boulder and the two nests stuck on it. in a childish way, you know, to film something that nobody had ever filmed alive before tickled our fancy and thought it was fun. Then up it fluttered onto the nest, and as it did so, the other parent flew across and drove the first one away. This was a great thrill for us, for as this happened, we became the first Europeans ever to see the white-necked Picathartes on its nest.

10:45Back in London, they set about turning the material they'd gathered into programmes. There'd be six in all, and the idea was each edition would show some of the best pictures from Sierra Leone and then cut to the studio, where Jack Lester from the zoo would do a live presentation of the animals they'd brought back. But things didn't quite go to plan. The first ZooQuest programme went out, but after that first appearance, Jack became very ill with a tropical disease, and so the head of television said, Attenborough, you thought you were director, but somebody's got to do the studio. Nobody else was there.

11:21You do it. David Attenborough stepped in front of the camera and a broadcasting legend was born. The audience loved it. We ended each programme by saying, but will we find Picatharty's Jim Necephalus, you see? Tune in next week. And I was a bit worried about whether this would actually make any impression on anybody. And actually, we were driving along Oxford Street, which you could do in those days. And the driver lent out and he said, Hello, Dave. Well, are we or are we not going to catch picker bloody farties? So I thought, well, maybe the programmes are beginning to catch on. And how. More expeditions followed and ZooQuest became one of the most popular programmes on British television running until 1963.

12:11Luis Hidalgo's Troll Through the Archives was first broadcast in 2021. Sir David Attenborough, of course, went on to present landmark natural history series like Life on Earth, Blue Planet and Planet Earth. Now 100 years old, he's regarded as one of the most outstanding naturalists of our time. Joining us now is Dr Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan conservationist and head of Wildlife Direct, a conservation organisation. And you are, Paula, no stranger to producing and presenting nature programmes. and you've met Sir David Attenborough a number of times. How would you describe the global impact of his work?

12:47Well, it's hard to put in a short sentence. Sir David has basically crafted a world relationship with nature, taken wild places and wild animals and brought them into our living rooms, made them part of our lives, and not just in a science-y, nerdy way, but in a very intimate way, and making us understand that we're part of nature and that we're also responsible for it. So I think it's had a profound impact all around the world, gotten people very excited about going outdoors, caring about what's in the neighbourhood, but also caring about what's happening on the other side of the world. Beyond Attenborough himself, wildlife documentary making has changed enormously over the years, not just in terms of the technology, whereas it used to be cans of film stock that you had to transport around the world.

13:35Now you have very small digital cameras, you have drones and so forth who can give fantastic shots. But what have you seen in Kenya? You know, Kenya has been a country that has been home to so many documentaries. So many filmmakers come to our country because of the iconic species we have here and the ease of filming them, whether it's Maasai Mara with the lions and Amboseli with all our elephants. Until very recently, though, it was always outsiders coming to tell our stories. And I think that's shifting dramatically. And it is linked in part to technology, not just the machines, but also our ability to watch content.

14:09The fact that anybody can now be a presenter or a producer of your own podcast, your own short films or series on YouTube. And that's really shifting things very dramatically. And we're seeing a great resurgence, not just in Kenya, but across Africa. I have a network of over a thousand young Africans who aspire to be filmmakers in all sorts of the different sectors of the film industry, but specifically on nature and wildlife. So I think there's an explosion of interest and opportunity as well. But does this filmmaking around wildlife, does it actually make any difference? Is there any real world impact in terms of protecting the environments and the species?

14:49Absolutely. I don't think there's any question. And I don't think these wildlife films would be doing so well if they weren't having an impact. And it's not to say that all films are about impact, but many are. And we saw this when David Attenborough did his episode on plastic pollution that transformed people's sense of agency and responsibility about plastics. And it led to real changes, actually, at a global level. So I think it does make a big difference. I've seen in this country, for example, visitors to Kenyan tourism is a big part of our economy. They come because they've seen something on a wildlife show or series somewhere and they want to see what David Attenborough was seeing or go to the place where David Attenborough was.

15:31So definitely it has a huge impact in that respect. And visitors coming to national parks across Africa contribute to conservation because that pays for the protection. But isn't the trajectory in the wrong direction? The rainforest are disappearing. deserts are expanding isn't there a danger that what we're doing with these films is merely documenting the decline of these environments that's a real concern absolutely but I also think that now with a real surge in impact filmmaking we're seeing wildlife filmmaking turning their craft more to telling the stories of challenges and also the stories of success and I think that's where the great opportunity lies I make a series called wildlife warriors and we shine a light on African role models at the front line wherever they are.

16:18And what they're doing is telling their stories in a way that's very relatable to our African audiences. And so I don't think that the telling of wildlife stories is damaging. At worst, it does nothing. But at best, it can actually transform understanding, interest, and of course, catalyse action. That's Dr. Paula Kahumbu, head of Wildlife Direct. Next, we've got a gripping story of strategic sabotage from the Second World War. This takes us to Norway, which in 1942 was under German occupation, and the Nazi war machine was hungry for Norway's natural resources. But the Norwegian resistance had other ideas.

17:00Here's Lars Bavanger. Today I'm taking you back to the early hours of the 5th of May 1942 and a Norwegian village near Trondheim. The country's been under Nazi-German occupation for two years. Now, a team of Norwegian resistance fighters are about to carry out what the Allied forces see as the top-priority sabotage operation in Norway at this stage of the war. One local family will become central to the action. The first sabotage was planned by my grandfather because he was an electrical engineer. He was responsible for the maintenance of all the electrical equipment for everything around the mining industry up there.

17:49That's Gunnar Deinboll Jensen. He grew up hearing how his uncle, Lieutenant Peter Deinboll, his mother Lita and his grandfather, Peter Sr., all became instrumental in trying to stop the Germans from extracting copper and sulfur from a mine near their village of Urkanger and shipping it to Germany. Both minerals were needed in weapons production. The Norwegian government in exile and its British allies were in no doubt what needed to be done. This was ranked as number one. It was the most important target for the Allies. It represented 25 % of the sulfur the Germans could get hold on. And that's a lot of explosives and bombs and bullets that could have killed the Allies.

18:38Electric trains carried the sulfur from the mine down to the harbour in Årkanger. On this early May morning in 1942, to halt that transport, the saboteurs set out to blow up the heavily guarded transformer that secured the train line's electricity supply. Gunnar's uncle Petter led the operation.

19:05He knew the area well. I've been there as a kid myself. It's an intense humming sound in the transformer. They were seven in all saboteurs. They had different tasks. Some watched the guards. And a couple of them went in. Lieutenant Dainbowl's team were under immense pressure. Not only was the operation very dangerous, if they failed, Allied aircraft would carpet bomb the valley and village to end the German transport. And that would have killed a lot of people, because it wasn't a precision bombing at the time. The area near the transformer station was heavily guarded. Some 200 German soldiers were stationed within 250 metres of it.

19:57a smaller team of three managed to sneak past and they only had one local Norwegian guard to deal with inside the station itself. They knocked him down and gagged him, yeah. And they put a thousand kroner in his pocket as a compensation. Uncle Petter that led the sabotage, he sent the others away. he was going to set off the blast. Lieutenant Petter Dainball used a timing device to give him a 20-minute head start to escape from the transformer station before the explosives went off. But the device took longer than expected. And he waited for the blast to go off and nothing happened. And there were guards there, you know, he had to crawl back.

20:50When he almost got to the door, it all exploded.

20:58so he was thrown to the ground and he started running when he could get on his feet again and he ran up steep hills he had played the hide and seek up there as a kid he had the Germans right behind him and at one point he was hanging over a rock cliff and they stepped on his fingers so close but still didn't find him. And he was dodging them up there for seven hours and he fled over the mountains to Sweden. Meanwhile, the rest of the team had managed to flee on bicycles towards Trondheim. While running for his life, Gunnar's uncle Petter also knew that if the German soldiers caught him, his own family and other locals who had been helping behind the scenes were at risk.

21:51They left some artifacts like coins, indications that there had been British troops there who were responsible for the sabotage, because they knew that the Germans would hit back on the local civil population to deter further sabotage. Blowing up the electricity supply put a stop to the trains for a while. When the Germans repaired it and resumed the shipment of sulfur, Lieutenant Petter Dainball and his team planned and executed further attacks on a boat in the harbour and on the train's locomotives. All the while, they were supported by locals, including Dainball's own family. And the locals came with food.

22:35My mother came with information, intelligence. She helped with the explosives, transport of that and of the guns. Nobody suspected a young sweet girl, 16, 17, and she could pass the German guards without being noticed. Yet suspicion grew around the Danebole family. They realised that there was talk in the town that maybe the Danebole family was involved in these sabotages, so they always had prepared an escape kit with the necessary things to escape, and they had planned a route for escape. In the end, they got a notification from the local sheriff that the Germans were on to them. They had to get away.

23:26Gunnar's mother and grandfather skied over the mountains to neutral Sweden. From there, they travelled to London, where both ended up assisting the exiled Norwegian government. Meanwhile, the saboteurs had finally managed to blow up all but one locomotive on the train line from the mine to the harbour. The German export of copper and sulphur came close to total collapse. For the Daneboel family, it was not all good news, however. Lieutenant Peter Daneboel perished in a plane crash over the North Sea shortly before the final operation.

24:03On the 7th of May 1945, the government and royal family returned to a liberated Norway. Crowds lined the streets singing the national anthem, as heard in this radio clip kept by the Norwegian National Library. Gunnar's family also headed home, but for them, the celebrations would not last. Well, they returned to Norway with the Norwegian exiled government and the king on his ship. in through the Oslofjord, and then they took off to their home further north in Norway, in Orkange. When they arrived there, my grandfather went to his former boss and said, I'll take up my work again. He was yelled at for having hurt the company Orkla.

24:54He was sacked. The mining company had been dependent on the German market even before the war and increased production of sulfur and copper during the occupation. In 2003, at a ceremony attended by representatives from the Åkla company, a bust of Lieutenant Petter Dainboll was unveiled near where the first sabotage took place. That was the first time we, as a family, got an apology from Åkla. and the Norwegian army was also present, which was very good to be part of for my mother, for my family and for me. Gunnar Dainbull Jensen's mother, Lita, died during the pandemic in 2020. Lars Babanga was speaking to Gunnar Dainbull Jensen and has a whole dedicated collection of Second World War stories on our website, including one about another Norwegian, Vidkun Kvisling, whose name has entered the English language as a byword for treachery.

25:58Go to bbc.com slash witness history. Still to come, Catholic nuns killed in Algeria's civil war. We heard gunshots. People were shouting, run, run. They shot to foreigners. Plus the discovery of a T-Rex fossil. Of course, I never thought that I would be able to actually collect a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That's like a dream of every child who loves dinosaurs. And how Nigeria's relay team won Olympic gold 12 years after running the race. But first, we're going to get up close and very personally involved in a tragedy that struck in Ghana 25 years ago. This was Africa's worst ever stadium disaster. Jen Dale has been speaking to the chairman of one of the football clubs involved.

26:45And just to warn you, what follows contains some distressing details. In Ghana, about 130 people have been killed in a stampede at a football stadium. Most of the victims were crushed as police fired tear gas after unrest during a match in Accra between the country's two top teams. It's May 9th, 2001, and at the Accra Sports Stadium in Ghana's capital city, Hearts of Oak are preparing to take on Asante Kotoko. It's a big evening derby clash in Ghana's Premier League. You're fully aware that the whole nation was watching with great interest, especially where the fortunes of the two clubs were at the time.

Read the full transcript

27:23I'd been put in to rebuild this extraordinary club. The momentum was on our side, the anticipation was huge. It was raining lightly, which was a little uncharacteristic. We knew the stadium would be more than packed. Kotoko chairman Herbert Mensah is in the VIP area. And there was a huge buzz, rival fans teasing one another and people had left. And this match, even from neighbouring countries to come across, to come and watch the match, it was huge. Asante Cotico are the visiting team and are leading 1-0 towards the end of the game. Hearts of Oak equalise and then... It was a late winning goal from the home team Hearts of Oak, which brought rival fans to their feet in the Accra Stadium and set the scene for the tragedy that followed.

28:10Angry fans of the visiting team, Asante Kotoko, began throwing seats onto the pitch. It was marked with controversy, not so much for the result. The supporters were up in arms about the subjectiveness of the officiating, triggered outrage amongst segments of the supporters. And so at the end of it, the supporters had had enough. They weren't fighting amongst themselves. They'd pulled some chairs, the plastic chairs, thrown them down, which was wrong. And you then had a chain of events with some members of the lower establishment overreacting. That's what brought the commotion. But there was no fighting between the rival fans.

28:55That's not what it was about. Police fired tear gas into the stands, sparking a stampede. With access to the pitch fenced off, many of the dead either suffocated or were crushed to death. And it was at that point that I was then called from where I was sitting with supporters coming and running and shouting, Chairman, Chairman, people are dying.

29:20It was raining and it was the dirt from the rain and the confusion all around and some of them looking for loved ones and not quite sure what to do. Herbert gets down from the VIP area and rushes the 50 metres to the away stand and what he sees there is truly harrowing. There was just a melee of bodies, entangled, trying to escape the tear gas, couldn't get out. Many had fallen from a tremendous height onto the concrete floor, and others were just tangled. It was just horrific, absolutely horrific at that point. It was madness, because when I saw that you couldn't get through to the bodies, You literally run up five metres of steps, then across 20, 30 metres, and then I run down to the ground to find that that gate was locked.

30:14I then run back across upstairs the same route in, and then literally started picking any body I could find. Fireman's lift, body on shoulder, up, across, down, and then laid the body, shouting all the time for people to help. With blood on his shirt, Herbert goes back and forth, ferrying around 30 bodies from the stand to where cars and pickups are waiting to take them to hospital. We didn't have a choice. You either get in there to save people or you just go away and read it on the news and then it's you and your conscience and your God. But what do you do? You see somebody in pain or in suffering.

30:54You have to help. I was screaming my head off, come and help, come on, get up, come and help. The injured had to be carried from the stadium. Hospitals quickly filled up with the casualties as an inquiry began into Ghana's worst ever sporting disaster. Herbert goes to the main military hospital to see those being treated. And the ridiculousness of it is that so many of them were having sympathy for me. Made no sense. They're the ones who had gone through this ordeal. And they were saying, Chairman, it'll be OK. Chairman, don't give up on us. and then we went from there into the morgue of where there were 96 bodies laid down but you just realize how pointless it was and you know it's always it's always the ordinary person who suffers isn't it and i called the king and i said to his majesty because the football club was his i just said this is what has happened he said he's seen it on the news and he just said look be strong There are three days of national mourning.

31:58A statue is later erected and the plinth states it's in remembrance of the 127 people who lost their lives. But Herbert says that number may be higher as some people weren't officially at the game. We followed the families and we've seen the survivors, the mothers who did not know that their kids had gone to the stadium. The wives, who didn't know, had their husbands had left to come to the big city to watch a football match. And they lose their lives simply because of a football match. That makes no sense. That makes no sense at all. Herbert sets up a charity to help bereaved families, the May 9th Foundation.

32:40So I then embarked on the programme of, you can't visit everybody, but visiting huge numbers of the families. and every year since then, on and around May 9th, we come together, break bread, spare time. During the year, we've helped a lot of them, helped a lot of the families with school fees, medical bills, taking care of problems. Following last month's tragedy in South Africa, in which 43 football fans died, accusing fingers are again being pointed at crowd control and safety standards in Africa's stadiums. I went back a few days after. It was terrible. There was still blood on the walls and on the floor.

33:21You know, the nations clearly didn't know what to do. A commission of inquiry set up after the tragedy blamed the police for an excessive use of force. The report called for improvement in the conduct of referees and good behaviour from soccer fans during league matches. It also made recommendations about stadium security, improvements to gates at the ground and the creation of nationwide rapid response teams. In Ghana, we rebuilt stadiums, changed access points. You'll see that the main stadiums have changed, a greater investment in stadiums. And I always keep a quiet eye out for the way stadiums are being constructed.

34:02Decades later, the events of May 9th are far from forgotten, even while shopping on a recent trip to England. And as I grabbed a trolley to pull, there was somebody working who just ran up to me and said, look, thank you. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, I was there. I said, where? He said, May 9th. And I saw what you did. So you're touched. We've made sure that nobody forgets May 9th. Nobody in Ghana forgets May 9th. I thank God for the lives of those who survived, because it's not about me, it's about them. And I'm humbled all the time. It's made me a better person. And I'm hoping that it's made others the same.

34:44Herbert Mensah, one-time chairman of Kotoko Football Club, is now president of Rugby Africa. He was speaking to Jendale. Next, we've got a very personal story from the deeply traumatic civil war in Algeria in the 1990s. It became known in North Africa as the Black Decade. More than 100 ,000 people died. Caught in the middle of the conflict was a small community of Augustinian nuns. Among them was sister Lourdes Migueles, who's been telling Colm Flynn about those turbulent times. We heard gunshots. People were shouting, run, run. They shot two foreigners. Then they shouted, Lourdes, Lourdes, Lourdes.

35:36They shot Katie and Esther. In the early 1990s, Algeria was torn apart by a brutal civil conflict. After the government and military cancelled national elections that an Islamist party was poised to win, armed groups took up weapons against the state, reported here in an episode of BBC Assignment in 1991. Martyrs Square, Algeria's city centre. Algeria's fledgling democracy crushed between a repressive state machine and Islamic extremists. And what followed was a decade of violence. Islamist militants targeted politicians, journalists, well-known figures and foreigners, accusing them of supporting the government.

36:23All foreigners were urged to leave the country, and many did. But Sister Lourdes Migueles was part of a group of Catholic nuns who decided to stay. I am Spanish and I am an Agustinian sister. I have been here in Algeria for 53 years.

36:44Lourdes arrived decades earlier, sent there by her religious order. At first it was hard because I understood absolutely nothing. I didn't understand Arabic, I didn't understand French, I didn't know Algeria at all. But little by little, I discovered what a vast country Algeria is, and I loved it.

37:08Lourdes trained as a nurse and worked in a hospital in the capital, Algiers. When I began nursing, I was the only foreigner in the entire paramedical school, and that allowed me to really immerse myself in the culture and in the Algerian way of life.

37:29That's where you discover all the difficulties, but also all the beautiful things. I never had problems in the hospitals, quite the opposite. I was always very appreciated.

37:45The fundamentalists had swept the board in last year's local elections, and they were outraged that the government had now rigged the ballot to cheat them out of victory in the upcoming national elections. By the early 1990s, Algeria was changing rapidly. After decades of single-party rule, the country had opened to multi-party elections. The Islamist Party was the Islamic Salvation Front. They had won a landslide in the first round of parliamentary elections in December of 1991, and were widely expected to secure an outright majority in the second round. And that's when the army stepped in, cancelled the vote, and banned the party.

38:26Campaigning in the Arab world's first free multi-party elections ended here in tear gas and shooting. Outraged, armed Islamist groups began attacking representatives of the state, intellectuals and public servants. And foreigners too were seen as symbols of outside influence and were warned they could be targeted as well. They gave signs to the people to leave. People were telling all foreigners that they should leave the country. but we were so deeply rooted among the people that we didn't feel like foreigners. We were loved. We loved the people. We were part of the people. Lourdes and the sisters thought they were safe because the work they were doing was non-political.

39:09They were simply serving in the hospitals and caring for those in need. Then in May of 1994, two priests were killed in the capital, Algiers. That's when the embassies wanted us to leave the country, but we didn't want to. We said we will stay here with the Algerian people. They welcomed us when everything was going well. Now that they are suffering, we cannot abandon those we love.

39:36Another one of the reasons Lourdes and the other sisters decided to stay was that many other priests and nuns had already left and the church was struggling to cope with supporting the needs of the people. And we wanted to stay with the church as well, because the church had been greatly diminished. We knew the risk, and we accepted the risk of death.

40:04By 1994, the conflict had escalated. Killings were no longer limited to officials, and attacks on civilians, aid workers and religious figures had become more frequent. And as I sit with Lourdes in the small chapel in their convent, she remembers that day, October the 23rd, 1994, when she and three other sisters were walking back from the hospital.

40:38It was like today at six in the evening. We had worked all day at the hospital and it was World Mission Sunday. And when we arrived, we were laughing. But at the same time, we had been warned to be careful. And when we were about to leave, I said, all four of us are not going out together. We'll go out two by two. If they kill two, they won't kill all four. So the others went ahead, and the provincial superior and I went behind.

41:14And when we arrived at the community door where we were going to celebrate the Eucharist we heard gunshots People were shouting, run, run They shot two foreigners Then they shouted, Lourdes, Lourdes, Lourdes They shot Katie and Esther

41:42The two sisters walking ahead of them, Caridad Alvarez and Esther Panigua, were shot and the gunmen fled. The news travelled back to their home country of Spain, reported on TVE, Spanish national television. Two Spanish religious people died last Sunday in Argelia in arms of Islamic terrorists. A little bit of 100 metres from here. They were killed about 100 metres from here. And when we arrived afterwards, we went out again and they were still on the ground. But the people were gone. We never knew who did it.

42:22After the killing, Sister Lourdes was ordered to return to Spain by her superior, a move she didn't want to make. I cried a great deal when I arrived in Spain because I felt like I had betrayed something, that I had abandoned the country I loved and suffered for.

42:44Sister Lourdes left Algeria during the darkest years of the conflict. And when she returned years later, the worst of the violence had receded. The civil war that had defined the 1990s was finally coming to an end. Today she lives in Algiers, where she runs a small community. and sitting in the convent chapel where those two assassinated sisters, Caridad Alvarez and Esther Panigua, were walking to on that fateful day. I asked Sister Lourdes Migueles what made her stay in Algeria, when it was so dangerous, and why she chose to come back. I wanted to return to build something beautiful. Where there had been death, life had to be given.

43:28That is why we're here now, for the children, for the after-school support, for helping women. This is a place of welcome, a place to build something beautiful together. And that is my wish for everyone, that we may all live in peace.

43:52Sister Lourdes Migueles speaking to Conflin in Algiers. Finally, a story to gladden the hearts of fossil hunters everywhere. On August 12, 1990, the world's most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found in South Dakota, USA. In 2015, Dina Newman spoke to one of the team involved in the landmark discovery. Since I was a young child, I loved collecting fossils. And, of course, I never thought that I would be able to actually collect a Tyrannosaurus rex. that's like the dream of every child who loves dinosaurs. Peter Larson is the founder of the Black Hills Institute, one of the biggest commercial exporters of fossils in the United States.

44:35He's based in South Dakota, which, due to its unique geology, is rich in fossils. Peter and his small team strike deals with private landowners, and they sell fossils they find on private land to museums and collectors all over the world. Peter will never forget the day his colleague Sue Hendrickson showed him two bone fragments she'd found on a nearby ranch on an Indian reservation. It was from a very, very large vertebra, and it was filled with this honeycomb pattern. And the only animal with a vertebra that size would be Tyrannosaurus rex. So, of course, I got very excited because we'd never collected a Tyrannosaurus rex before, and I asked her if there was more there, and she said there's lots more.

45:19And so we ran the two miles back to where she had found it, And the whole ground beneath this cliff face was covered with pieces of bone. And there were three articulated vertebrae just poking out of the ground. I was absolutely sure that that was going to be, you know, a complete T-Rex, because there was so much bone exposed on the surface there. For the next 17 days, Peter and Sue stayed right there on the cliff digging. Peter knew they were about to make history, so they filmed every stage of their laborious excavation. We went 30 feet up above where the bones were coming out of the ground and started digging 30 feet above, knowing that a T-Rex is going to be about 40 feet long if it's stretched out.

46:01This one shouldn't be stretched out, but we needed to get back into that cliff face enough too. And that's a lot of rock to move. We did that all by hand. Once they finally got to the skeleton, the challenge was to stop the bone fragments from breaking up once they're removed from the earth. To do that, they applied a special consolidant to the bones. And finally, they mapped the position of the fossil on paper. I actually laid these long strips of paper out on the surface of the fossil and mapped the position of each of the bones. That's important to try to understand the series of events that led that fossil to be preserved that way.

46:41As work went on, Peter and his team pieced together the story of the dinosaur. It was female, 66 million years old, and they called her Sue. It's almost, this is going to sound kind of weird, but it's almost like a religious experience for me to have the privilege to unearth something like this. This is not just a pile of bones. This was an individual animal that lived. She was this life form that was on this planet that occupied the same space that we were occupying while we were collecting her. She stood right there and died right there. If you don't get that, I don't think you should be digging dinosaurs.

47:26The Native American landowner, too, seemed excited about their amazing discovery. He was very happy that we had found the T-Rex. We paid him$5 ,000 for the skeleton. But you must have understood at the time that this T-Rex was worth much, much more than$5 ,000. No, well, no, not really. No one had ever paid that kind of money for a dinosaur before. In any case, Peter insists they never looked at Sue commercially. We have a museum in Hill City, South Dakota, and we wanted something spectacular for that museum. And this, of course, fit the bill. What could be better than the largest and most complete dinosaurus-rec skeleton that's ever been discovered?

48:12And it was going to put us on the map as a major museum. And everybody in the town was excited that it would bring more visitors to Hill City. And they would buy gasoline in Hill City. And they would shop at the grocery store. And they would stay in the motels. And the entire town was just ecstatic that this dinosaur was going to be there. Initially, Sue the dinosaur stayed at the Black Hills Institute, while researchers took the opportunity to learn more about her violent death. We found actually parts of a couple of other T-Rexes with her. You could see that the bones were broken when they were very fresh.

48:48Perhaps there were two family groups together that came together, and whether they were fighting over territory or fighting over a carcass, we don't know. but we do know that she and this other one were killed by other T-Rexes. But as the news spread of their extraordinary discovery, several legal objections were raised by the landowner, by the government, and by some in the academic community. Finally, in May 1992, Peter got the knock on the door. Two FBI agents said that we were hiding this dinosaur on our premises, which was ridiculous because even in the back room where she was being prepared, we had a little guest book, and more than 2 ,000 people had signed that guest book.

49:30Despite Peter's indignation, the T-Rex's legal status was ambiguous. The landowner had changed his mind about the deal he had struck with the Black Hills Institute. Meanwhile, his land was in government trust, and the government objected to a private fossil collector prospecting on its property. So Sue the T-Rex was confiscated. despite noisy protests from Hill City residents supporting Peter and his institute. Peter was charged with numerous offences to do with his trading in fossils in the USA and abroad. He was jailed for two years for two offences related to carrying foreign currency. Neither of his convictions was linked to sue the T-Rex.

50:15But the judge decided that the fossil belonged to the landowner. Eventually, the T-Rex was auctioned off for a staggering$8.6 million, making her the most valuable dinosaur in the world. We had a friend who had offered to try to buy her back for us, and he had actually bid$1.2 million or something like that, which was beyond what his accountant told him he could do. When he was outbid, I was sad, and then as the bidding went up and up, I became more happy about it. I thought, you know, that's really good because it shows that fossils really do have value and that it also showed what a good job that my team of preparators and collectors had done.

51:01To everyone's relief, Sue the T-Rex was purchased by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Most academics would have hated to see her disappear into a private collection. Some scientists object to any commercial fossil collecting and trading, But Peter Larson remains unapologetic about his business. He points out that museums would not be able to survive without private prospectors. Museums these days do not have field crews that can do this. They don't have people who can mount fossils. People I know think it's immoral to sell a fossil, but sorry, that's the way the world works. To prepare, to clean, to mount and all of this, a T-Rex takes about 25 ,000 hours of work.

51:43If we had not collected Sue by now, just the rate of erosion on that cliff face, the pelvis which was protecting the skull would have been completely eroded away and the whole front of her face would be gone. Would be completely gone. After his release from prison, Peter Larson completed his PhD in paleontology. He still lives in Hill City, South Dakota, and still runs the Black Hills Institute. Sue the T-Rex, the most complete T-Rex skeleton in the world, is on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Peter Larson was speaking to Dina Newman in 2015, and you can see Sue the T-Rex, well, her fossilised skeleton at least, in a photo on our website, where you will also be able to uncover a whole treasure trove of first-hand stories from the past.

52:31Go to bbc.com slash witnesshistory. Finally, this week's Sporting Witness. Now, they say that justice delayed is justice denied, and that applies in sport just as it does in criminal law. At the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000, the Nigerian 4x400m relay team surpassed expectations by winning silver in dramatic fashion. But in the years that followed, revelations about doping in the winning team, the USA, began to emerge. Here's Tim O 'Callaghan.

53:09I want you to imagine that you've just won a silver medal at the Olympic Games. The crowd are cheering, and whilst you won't hear your national anthem being played, you'll stand on the second step of the podium, probably feeling pretty proud of yourself. But what if it should have been gold? And what if you didn't get that gold for another 12 years? How would you feel then? Well, that's exactly what happened to the Nigerian 4x400m relay team at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. I was not disappointed with my silver medal. It was one out of hard work and a lot of sacrifices. But then for them to cheat and forfeit the goal and the goal given to me was something that we were very happy about.

53:52Also on the positive side, it made our story unforgettable. That's Enafiok Udo Obong, who goes by the name Eni. A talented athlete in school, he dreamt of making it to the first Olympic Games of the 21st century, a goal he achieved at the age of 18.

54:13The athletics team was coached by the legendary Nigerian 400-metre runner, Innocent Ebeniki, who had won bronze in the relay at the LA Olympics in 1984. He was impressed by the times the 400-metre runners were producing in training. At that point in time, he started believing that probably something special could happen to Ross in Sydney. I didn't go to the Olympics to win a medal. I went there because it was an opportunity to travel out of the country, to go to Australia, to meet different kinds of people and different kinds of cultures. So the mindset wasn't really there to win. But then he changed my mindset.

54:50As the days went on, as the training went on, everything changed. And I think the final thing that changed my mind that, look, we are in serious business and things could be real, was generally when Cathy Freeman won the Olympic gold. Australia's indigenous 400-metre runner who had lit the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony. I was there in the stadium watching the whole atmosphere and I felt the whole emotions. Everything was just wonderful. It was a feeling that I had never felt before and I just looked at the coach and I said, coach, I want to be on the podium the way she is. The 4x400-metre relay was one of the final events in the athletic schedule at the Sydney Olympics.

55:30On day one, Eni and his teammates won their heat and posted the quickest time of anyone in the competition. They also won their semi-final but were the sixth fastest team overall. In the final, all eyes were on the USA team because this was going to be the final race of the great Michael Johnson's career. He'd won gold in the 400 metres a few days earlier and was the world record holder in that event and the 200 metres. I was just directly behind him as we were entering into the stadium. In a mixed zone, there were lots of journalists, lots and lots. It was a crowd, and he had come up with these new golden shoes, and everybody wanted to see Johnson and take a picture of him.

56:08And they actually pushed me aside. So I got very, very angry. I said, look, we're all going to run a race, and I'm not going to be pushed aside because of Michael Johnson. I mean, we all have two hands, two legs. That actually helped me throughout the race because it pushed away all the nervousness I had, all the anxiety I had, and it was just anger, nothing but anger. that, look, I've got to run, and I've got to prove to people that everybody can run. Eni watched as his teammates, Clement Chukwa, Jude Monye and Sunday Barda, all ran their parts of the race. Going into the final leg, Nigeria were in fourth, a long way off the USA in first, and about a second behind the Bahamas and Jamaica, who were battling for second place.

56:49Eni had just one thought in his mind as he waited his turn to show the world what he could do. All I knew was that, get me that button, and I'm going to bloody well run. As Eni rounded the bend into the final home straight, he was still behind Jamaica and the Bahamas, who were almost neck and neck, when he noticed a gap appear on the inside of the track. I think the Bahamas guy was trying to block off the Jamaican guy from passing him on the outer side. So he opened up the inner lane. And I just saw that within the race, he just flashed through my head within a second. And look, it's an opportunity.

57:24So I just gave it everything I had got, All my training flashed before me, everything my coach had said, just everything. I just pushed it out. The energy of the crowd, because the Australian crowd was amazing, was marvellous. 80 ,000 people were shouting all through. It was like watching a football match. You just had that energy. Eni put on a tremendous burst of speed and surged up the inside lane of the other two athletes and dipped for the line. When I crossed, I knew I had a medal. But my teammates, I think it was Jude Moyer, sort of shouted, silver! Then they all ran towards me. It's silver, it's silver, it's silver.

58:00So it dawned on me that, yes, something amazing had just happened. Eni and his teammates got their moment on the podium. And that really is where this story should end. But four years later, there was a development. One of the Americans, Jerome Young, tested positive for a band substance. He had run in the semi-finals, but not the final. And so it was decided that the Americans would be allowed to keep their gold medal. We felt a tinge of disappointment. But we had to be very real. We said, look, he didn't run the final, so we still think that we deserve the silver and the Americans deserve to win.

58:38We also thought, in a sense, at that point in time, the Americans basically could bring three relay teams and they would win gold, silver and bronze. But there was to be another twist. In 2008, Antonio Pettigrew, another member of the American team who had run in the final, admitted to using banned substances and this changed the view of Eni and the Nigerian team. No, this is very, very bad and then we started feeling that we should be calling for the redistribution of the medals and the disqualification of the Americans. Michael Johnson then announced that he would give up his medal, calling it tainted.

59:13He spoke to the BBC about it in 2011. It was news because he was one of the guys that I just never would have suspected. And I was very disappointed when I found that out and what it did to me. I'd always been a five-time Olympic gold medalist. Because he didn't need to be using performance-enhancing drugs to run fast, number one. Two, we didn't need him on the relay. And so it was really disappointing, so I gave it back. Antonio Pettigrew took his own life in 2010 in the aftermath of the revelations. On the 12th of July 2012, the result of the 4x400 metre relay at the Sydney Olympics was officially overturned by the International Olympic Committee.

59:56And 12 years after the race, Nigeria were declared the Olympic champions in the event. When we heard that this was going to happen and then we started hearing the stories of this was going to happen, we were hoping that we would be invited to London at the Olympics and then have the medal presented to us in front of the crowd, which would have been much better. It would never have been as good as having that 12 years earlier, but at least we would have had that feeling of victory and pride. Our national anthem being sung and our flags raised when we are on the podium. But at that point in time, nothing like that was arranged.

1:00:31There was a ceremony held in Nigeria by the head of state, the president, Good Luck Jonathan. So in front of his executive council, his cabinet, During an executive meeting, they invited the whole team to come and the president of the Nigerian Olympic Committee presented us the medals in front of the president and his ministers. As an athlete, the kind of recognition you want was not really what we got, but I think it's better than nothing. One member of the Nigerian team who didn't get his golden moment was Sunday Bada, who died before the result was changed. A gold medal was presented to his family.

1:01:08Eni believes the saga can still be used to discuss the issue of doping in athletics. If we just won the gold it probably would have been almost a forgotten story. There are many gold medalists after that. But because of the peculiar way in which the gold came about people can look back and say oh what do you think about doping? We can now have different conversations about different aspects of the sports which we would never have had if we just had won the gold on the field.

1:01:36Eni Udo Obong was speaking to Tim O 'Callaghan and remaining philosophical about the 12 years it took for him and his Nigerian teammates to get their gold medals. And that's where we breast the tape at the end of this edition of the History Hour. We'll be chasing hard to bring you more gold-standard first-hand stories from the past next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. We weren't going to ask permission, we were just going to do it.

1:02:07It was such an amazing feeling, it was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit, we laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:02:55keeping you in the driver's seat. Take five, the stay-in-your-car 10-minute oil change. Find your nearest shop at take5.com. Music, food, art. These things define and unite us, and they come in colors that breathe culture, colors that connect us with their variety and richness. You'll find that same variety in Valspar Ultra Paints. Great coverage and durability starting at$29.98 per gallon. Enjoy everyday protection against scuffs and wear with a smooth, washable finish. We're made of colors. And with Valspar Ultra, you can reflect that pride of culture you have inside on every wall of your home.

1:03:32Available at Lowe's.

From the publisher

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 career. Our guest is Dr Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan conservationist and head of the conservation organisation, Wildlife Direct.

Then, the story of a World War Two sabotage plot carried out by a team of Norwegian resistance fighters.

We hear about Africa's worst stadium disaster, at the Accra Sports Stadium in Ghana.

Plus, a Spanish nun reflects on the killing of two fellow sisters during the Algerian civil conflict in the 1990s.

We also hear how the world's most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found in South Dakota, USA, in 1990.

Finally, how the Nigerian 4 x 400m relay team were declared Olympic champions, 12 years after the race.

Contributors:

Sir David Attenborough - naturalist and broadcaster (BBC archive)

Dr Paula Kahumbu, CEO of Kenyan conservation organisation, Wildlife Direct

Gunnar Deinboll Jenssen - nephew of the Norwegian resistance fighter Lieutenant Peter Deinboll

Herbert Mensah - former chair of the football club Asante Kotoko

Sister Lourdes Migueles - Spanish nun who chose to stay in Algeria during civil conflict

Peter Larson - American commercial fossil collector and researcher

Enefiok Udo-Obong - former Nigerian sprinter

(Photo: Sir David Attenborough, naturalist and broadcaster, with two ring-tailed lemurs. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

More from The History Hour

All 65 episodes
Sir David Attenborough's first Zoo Quest and a WW2 sabotage mission in NorwayThe History Hour · 1 h 1 min
Listen in VO