Taiwan's White Terror and the making of City of God

29:24They were sent to live in townships on the Cape Flats, an area many South Africans called apartheid's dumping ground. People didn't have money. A lot of people unemployed. We had a problem of alcohol in our society. Gang fights, people being robbed, being killed. We were excluded from the rest of the world. Ashley came from a very poor family. Ashley took the responsibility at the age of 13, 14 already to go and work at night in the factories. And in the morning, he would go to school. The leader revolution also. What was he motivated by? Ashley came from a broken family. His father was killed by gangsters.

30:05So where this guy came to understand this great love for people at a very young age, it's still a question I have to answer. Though he was young, he had a love for life that I can't explain. He was concerned about those who are poor, those who are downtrodden. Like students across South Africa who are mobilising against white minority rule, Ashley was still at school when he became politically active. Known for his fiery speeches, his intellect and his warm nature, the teenager soon emerged as an influential and much-loved leader, organising student activities in Bontiaval following a call by the then-banned African National Congress Party, the ANC, for South Africa to be made ungovernable.

30:54Whenever Esli addressed a crowd, you could hear a spell falling on the ground. People listened to him, people admired him. This guy knew exactly what he was saying. He was just a people's person. The Cape Flats had become an unexpected hotbed of resistance. Under apartheid, people classified as coloured were given marginally more rights than black people. But young activists like Ashley rejected those divisions. Ashley told us that these are all our comrades, they're not black, the way we were taught. These are our brothers. He broke the colour barrier for most of us. Ashley and his comrades were inspired by Steve Biko, the activist who founded the influential anti-apartheid black consciousness movement in the late 1960s.

31:40Biko was killed in police custody in 1977, but his ideas galvanized young activists across South Africa. We were so young, but we remember the battles that took place, the smell of tear gas and the sounds of bullets and the fires which were burning. Steve Biko, he was one of our great inspirers. He wasn't afraid to be killed. Riots and their aftermath have shocked South Africans, black and white, into hard recognition of their country's complex race relations. The violent crackdown of the mid-80s meant that the activists from Bontierville had to get creative when it came to raising political awareness in their community.

32:19When we'd be with Esli, maybe with the traveling from one place to another, by train or by bus. Then Ashley would either decide to sit on one side of the train and we sit on the other side. And in these discussions, Ashley would always be the one for apartheid and we would try to convince him, no, apartheid is wrong. And then as far as when people in the train started to become attentive to the discussions and they would stand up, they would beat Ashley up. We'd tell them, no, no, no, we're all comrades, we're our brother. It was our way of, Ashley's way of politicising people, people so they can understand and go home and talk to their children.

32:53to their friends. They said, we were on the train, we heard this and this, because people were afraid of information. They would deny information. And whose idea was that? Ashley, of course. He was the naughty one. He came up with all the funny ideas. It was street theatre as resistance, and it worked. But while the threat of arrest, detention or death didn't deter young people from joining the anti-apartheid struggle, many in the community didn't support their activities, particularly as the threat of reprisal was ever present. Both Ashley and Adil eventually joined the ANC's armed wing, Umkonto Wessizwe, which carried out acts of sabotage against the apartheid state.

33:33People hated us because they didn't want to change either because of fear or ignorance or something, but not all of them were supporting us. Ashley's influence meant that he was being monitored by the security branch of the apartheid state's police force. Still only 19, He went into exile in late 1985. I went to Ashley's in-laws now. In the backyard, Ashley was sitting. There was a fire burning. He came and he greeted me and he hugged me. And we started to talk about things, about the people I must recruit. So we sat there, we talked, and then he started to play guitar. We sang some freedom songs and Bob Barley.

34:10Oh, pirates, yes, they're uptied. That one, he laughed at one. He knew his time came, but he told me. He's coming back for me. In July 1987, 18 months after that last meeting, Ashley Creel was shot and killed when security police officers tracked him down to a safe house in the Cape Flat suburb of Athlone, where he had been staying having returned from exile. He was 20 years old. His funeral was the scene of yet more violence as the crowds who had turned out to pay their respects were attacked by the security police who attempted to remove the ANC flag that had been draped over the coffin. By then, Adil was in exile in Lesotho.

34:56It was in August, and as we were walking to town, all the ANC guys, and we got a newspaper, sort of pizza, and I saw some policemen trying to pull the flag. Then I read, as the Kriil, MK Guerrilla, was killed. I felt very broken, and I cried. I wanted to go back, but I knew that I could not go back because I was going to be killed myself. The security police officer who killed Ashley, Geoffrey Benzine, was granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He testified that it had been an accident, an account rejected by Ashley's family and others. Benzine died in 2024, and the circumstances surrounding Ashley's death have still not been established.

35:40A private inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Ashley Grill is to be set up by his family. As South Africa emerged from white minority rule in the 1990s, many of the people who lost their lives in the struggle against apartheid became symbols of the country's painful past, including Ashley, who Nelson Mandela paid tribute to after he was released from prison in 1990. I salute the competence of the country's history.

36:14like Ashley Grimm who has paid the ultimate price for the freedom of all South Africans. I want people to know Ashley as a beautiful person that he was and the commitments that he personally made. He gave his life, everything he had, he gave his life twice. Once when he left the country and secondly when he took his life brutally. I want people to realise that freedom isn't free and Ashley always said, victory or death, we shall be free.

36:54That was the former anti-apartheid activist Adil Ghori November speaking to Sumeya Bachs and remembering his friend and fellow resistance fighter, Ashley Creel. Next we move from the outskirts of Cape Town to a forest in Guatemala where, in 1988, a pioneering environmental scheme was launched aimed at contributing to the struggle against global warming. It was an idea that has since become commonplace. Instead of cutting its own emissions, a company would pay to plant trees to compensate for the pollution it produced. The project is widely regarded as the world's first carbon offset scheme. Here's Stan Alcorn.

37:35I'm in Totonicapan, walking through a high-altitude pine forest that for generations has been cared for by the indigenous K 'iche' community here, like Roberto Antonio Alvarado.

37:52When I was a kid, they told us, look, if you want to make use of a tree, you need to know how. Growing up in the 1980s, Roberto lived off this forest, cutting down white pines for firewood and furniture he'd make with his dad. But he and his neighbors would also get together to plant new trees. What we did before, a long time ago, what we did was collect the little seedlings from below the trees and come and replant them. That's what we did. For Roberto, this is where the story begins of what would later be called the world's first carbon offset. The idea that we had was, since we're already planting trees, what do we do to plant more trees?

38:43So we look for institutions, organizations to help us start a nursery. They would get that help from an unusual source. It was the summer of 1988. There were catastrophic floods in Bangladesh, and in the United States, there were wildfires burning in Yellowstone National Park. And a record-breaking heat wave was the lead story on ABC World News tonight. In Georgia, a woman died from heat stroke while she was working in a tobacco field. Some people have become so distraught, they have told their congressman, God is against us. This is when the climate became a mainstream political issue in the country.

39:25The temperature hit 37 degrees Celsius in Washington, D.C. on the day of a pivotal hearing in the U.S. Senate. I think the question that everybody's asking today with all of the heat... Colorado Senator Tim Wirth. Is the current heat wave and drought related to the greenhouse effect? The greenhouse effect theory, that CO2 traps heat like a glass box around the Earth, it was already common knowledge among scientists. But at this hearing, leading climatologist James Hansen testified that it was no longer just a theory. This evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.

40:09If the climate was changing now, then the next question was what to do about it. Political activists hastily organized a conference called the Global Greenhouse Network. Good morning, everyone. We're here for an historic gathering. that was broadcast on C-SPAN in the U.S. We've been interested in asking the question, to what extent can policy choices made today affect both the timing and the severity of global warming? That's Irving Mincer of the World Resources Institute. And at the conference, he went through a long list of policy ideas, from raising taxes on fossil fuels to underwriting investment for more energy-efficient air conditioners.

40:48And also, what if coal-fired power plants were also planting trees, enough trees to soak up the same amount of planet-warming CO2 as all the burning coal was going to emit? So that the company was then responsible not just for putting the CO2 in the atmosphere, but for getting it out. The very next day, Mincer's Institute announced it as a reality. Applied Energy Services, which is constructing a coal-fired power plant in Connecticut, is involved in a 10-year project to plant more than 50 million trees in Guatemala. The idea was that the 52 million trees would offset the tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide released by the power plant.

41:35But the reality was a little more complicated. The company that owned the Connecticut plant started out by giving$2 million to what was then called the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, or CARE. CARE, in turn, spent that money on an existing agroforestry program in hundreds of different rural communities in the western highlands of Guatemala. In Totonicapan, where I visited, that coal money paid half of Roberto's salary in a new job, setting up nurseries for trees. Here's where the nursery started, right here in this area. The original nursery was just a little clearing covered in straw.

42:17But now it's been replaced by shiny new greenhouses, full of tens of thousands of tiny baby trees. Now each year the communities ask for as many as 90 ,000 trees. And nearby we can see the full-grown results, towering red pines and white pines and an endangered pinabete tree that's so big I can't get my arms around it. And this is one of the thousands of trees that was for carbon credit purposes counts as sequestered carbon. Each tree and its hundreds of kilograms of converted CO2 is a tiny piece of what would come to be known as the world's first carbon offset. A study 10 years into the project found that all these trees had sequestered 270 ,000 tons of carbon, which sounds like a lot.

43:12But in fact, it was only 2 % of what the Connecticut power plant had already pumped out. That failure to capture enough carbon, though, was not exactly top of mind here in Totonicapan. No, no, no, no, no, no. Has that occurred? No, no, no, no, no. That didn't occur to us. For us, the idea is to maintain a water source. That's the idea. The fresh water that sustains communities all around Totonicapan comes from a thousand different streams that start here in this mountaintop forest. The trees are like a natural filter, keeping that water clean.

43:54They say, if we don't have a forest, we don't have water. So the forest is live. That's why we worry about maintaining all the forests.

44:08The coal plant in Connecticut was shut down in 2011, which meant no more carbon offset money. But the work here has continued. Today, all of Roberto's salary is paid for by the local government. And the shiny new greenhouses have a whole bunch of different funders. Here there are various donors. This one was donated by the UICN. Here's one that was donated by, oh, I forgot the name. With all of these different donors, I wondered, what would have happened if they'd never gotten the carbon offset money in the first place? I would say that since the culture we have is about planting trees, we would have done it anyways.

44:58Just a little more slowly. So the reforestation still would have happened? That's right. For the forests of Totonicapan, that is undoubtedly a good thing. But it also points to one of the major critiques of the carbon offset idea. Because if Roberto was right, and these trees would have been planted even without the coal money, then the utility can't really take credit for their sequestered carbon. And even as the carbon credit industry has become a multi-billion dollar market, that challenge of proving the dollars actually made a difference is one that hasn't gone away. It's still a lot easier to put CO2 into the atmosphere than it is to make good on a promise to get it back out.

45:53Stan Alcorn in Guatemala was speaking to Roberto Antonio Alvarado about the mixed results of the world's first stab at a carbon offset deal. It was produced by Dennis Funk and was a written-in-air production for the BBC. Next, we've got this week's sporting witness, and this is something of a battle of the sexes. Basketball has long been part of the Olympic Games, but only for men. Women had to wait until the 1970s before getting their own Olympic tournament. Here's Stefania Gozza.

46:26It's the 19th of July, 1976, and we are inside the Centre Etienne de Marteau in Montreal, Canada. The men played basketball the day before, and today, for the very first time in Olympic history, it's the women's turn. I didn't even think about the Olympics. I, as a young person, watched the men's NBA. And so my dream was to be the first female to play on an NBA basketball team. This is Julianne Brzezinski-Simpson. She was co-captain of the U.S. women's basketball team at the 1976 Olympics. Women's basketball entering the Olympics began to be talked about in 1972. 1972. The host country is the one that decides what sports they could provide facilities and which ones they supported.

47:20And so in 1972, we were not really supported. It was just talked about. But when it came out to 1976, Canada was really one of the countries like the United States that wanted to add women's basketball, but I did not have any dream of being a professional basketball player like they are nowadays because there just was not any opportunities other than in college or internationally. Men's basketball has been part of the Olympics since 1936, but it took 40 years for the International Olympic Committee to open the door for women to dribble, pass, and most importantly, shoot the ball through the hoop.

48:09Julienne was 23 years old when she got her chance to become an Olympian. It may seem strange now, but back then, the number one rule at the Olympics was that all competitors had to be amateurs. Professional athletes were banned from competing, at least in theory. Many of the countries were professional at that time. It was well known that some countries got around the amateur rule by employing athletes in nominal state jobs while allowing them to train full time. For instance, the Soviet Union at that time, they had a national team and they played from one side of the country to the other. That was their job.

48:52They were quite older, 30. There There was one that was over 40. But in the United States, in order to play in the Olympics, the policy was you had to be an amateur. And so all of us had other jobs. I was a schoolteacher. This meant the team had to bond and build team spirit quickly. We would only see each other and practice with each other a week or two before the competition, as opposed to the other countries, that was their job. That's all that they did. We would compete and then have to go back to our jobs. In October 1974, the International Olympic Committee announced that women's basketball would be included in the next Olympic Games.

49:44To make room for it, the men's tournament was reduced from 16 teams to 12, and the six-team women's tournament was introduced. In 1975, I played on the world championship team, which qualified you for the Olympics, which we did not qualify for. In our pool round, we lost two games, a total of three points, and so we placed eighth. And then in order to get into the Olympics, We had to qualify about four weeks prior in McMaster University in Canada, which we really were not supposed to even place. We won the championship game against Cuba that allowed us to qualify. So this was the lineup for the first Olympic women's basketball tournament.

50:38Canada, the Soviet Union, Japan, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Bulgaria. You know, we were anxious to start. We had arrived in the Olympic Village, and we were actually on the seventh floor. It was an apartment. And I remember walking out my door and looking over the balcony and thinking, this only happens once in a lifetime. And so I walked up and down those seven flights of stairs and did not take the elevator until I left with my luggage.

51:21Despite the pressure and the hard work, Julien and her teammates managed to find the time and their own ways to relieve the stress. We decided we were going to do something out of the ordinary. And so the two or three weeks prior to the competition, the coach would get us up at 6 o 'clock in the morning. We'd go have breakfast, and by 8 o 'clock we're in the gym to start for 9 o 'clock practice for two or three hours. So one night we decided the next morning we were all going to show up in our pajamas, our slippers, our robes. And so we did. We did bring other clothes to changing. Our coach didn't crack a smile.

52:08She saw what we did. We thought it was so funny. So as soon as we put our stuff down, Billy Moore, our head coach, said, OK, let's go. She blew her whistle. And we all looked at each other. And we were like, oh, my goodness, is she serious? And so we practiced between 20 and 30 minutes in our pajamas. Those who wore slippers, I had sneakers on. A couple people had ropes on, had pajamas underneath. But she never laughed about it. You know, I'm sure she was laughing behind us. And finally, the day of their first game arrived. Their opponents were Japan. Our goal then was that we were going to score the first bucket of the games.

52:56The first basket ever scored by a woman in an Olympic game. Ball goes up. We did not get the tip. Japan got the tip. And we were just saying, don't let them score, don't let them score. And my girl got the ball and was going to the basket. And before she could even take the shot, I fouled her. This is not in the record book, but I was the first person to foul in the Olympic Games because I knew if she took one more step, she would shoot the ball and possibly make it. I fouled and I took that foul. They took the ball out of bounds. We stole it and we were running a fast break. And Lucy Harris received the ball and scored.

53:43We thought we won a championship after she scored. But they haven't. We got behind in that game, that game we did not win. But the spirit of the Olympics, the spirit of us doing what we needed to do, really took us to the next step in the next several games that we won. The Soviet Union ended up winning gold, but the United States took home the silver. When we qualify for the Olympics, One of the newspapers said that out of all the teams that were in the Olympics, we were not the worst team. We were the second worst team. And so for the newspaper then to have to turn around and write the positive article that we end up winning a silver medal, it was to me a miracle that all the pieces came together.

54:40And there was not one time I don't think any of my teammates or I thought that we would go home without a medal. Julianne Brzezinski-Simpson speaking to Stefania Gotzer and remembering the first time women got to compete in the Olympic Games in basketball in 1976, a mere 40 years after the men. Finally this week, we celebrate the European summer holiday season by remembering the birth of Club Med. These days, the all-inclusive holiday is a familiar part of the travel industry, with food, drinks and activities all included in the price. But the concept had to start somewhere. And it was in the summer of 1950 that the first Club Med resort opened, offering a new kind of post-war holiday built around simplicity, community and affordability.

55:32Lucy Burns has been hearing from Pierre-Xavier Becret, whose parents worked at that very first resort. If you're cold and fed up with the wintry weather, join us on a trip to the sun. Here on the Mediterranean playground, visitors from all over the world can guarantee to relax and have fun in an atmosphere of sun, sand and sea. My mother was just going out of a business school. She didn't want to work in a bank or anything. She was a bit unconventional, I would say. This is Pierre-Xavier Becret, whose mother Thérèse worked on the first ever Club Med holiday. And she saw an ad in a newspaper for a secretary for a new leisure organisation in Mallorca.

56:16So Thérèse set off for Mallorca, an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain. She had a fiancé called Jean-Pierre, later Pierre-Xavier's father, who was travelling around Europe at the time. And then she said, why don't you come to Mallorca? So that's what he did. In fact, he remained more than 40 years. And what was it that they found when they got there? I would say nearly nothing. There were just huts, no running water. That was a sandy beach and just some people who went there because there had been some advertising. The trip was the brainchild of a Belgian called Gerard Blitz. He was a very tall man.

56:57He was a water polo champion. He participated in the Olympic Games before the war. He was a Jew. He had been in the camps, his family too. And he said, I want people to be happy, to forget the war and to be able to go to the sea and practice sports and be happy and free together. That's the way he launched it, but without any money and organization. So at the beginning, he found just some friends that joined the adventure. Gerard Blitz wasn't the first to come up with the idea of a holiday village where people paid an all-inclusive rate to relax near a beach. British companies Butlins and Pontins had been running holiday camps on the British coast since the 1930s.

57:39But what made Blitz's vision different was the good weather, the low prices, and the glamorous Mediterranean locations. He called it the Club Mediterranea, or Club Mediterranean, shortened to Club Med. This is how life was meant to be, was meant to be enjoyed. All day long there's sunshine, so why wear anything but a swimsuit? The more you wear, the more there is to wash and iron. And who wants to do that when the days are already sailing by far too quickly? You just had swimsuits, tiny swimsuits, and so there was no social distinctions. Everybody was on the same level and the story people always tell about Club Med is once two people are discussing together in a boat and the first one say, well, what do you do in life?

58:29Which was not the principal subject of conversation. One of them said, for instance, I'm working at Renault and the other one say, okay, I'm working at Renault too, that's fun. and one of them was the top manager and the other one was working in a factory. That's the way it was at Club Med. Club Med soon spread beyond Mallorca, setting up holiday villages all around the Mediterranean. In the beginning, they were pretty rudimentary, but that was all part of the charm. Your home for this holiday is built on the basis that you'll never even be in it, except, of course, to sleep. No light, electric or otherwise, no water, hot or otherwise, no chairs or tables, no sheets, blankets, crockery or carpets, for a dreadful moment when you first arrive, you're reminded of the army.

59:16Pierre Xavier's parents became chefs de village, heads of villages, and one of his father Jean-Pierre's responsibilities was maintaining the community atmosphere. So he just came here one morning at breakfast and he said, OK, there's a problem. The machine to peel the potatoes is broken and we need help. Otherwise, you won't be able to have lunch today. So please come, as many people as you can, and help us to prepare the food. And they began to peel the potatoes. And then what happened was the musicians came, so there was music, people were singing, and afterwards they offered drinks and so on.

59:54And he said this was at the beginning of the week, and this helped create a better atmosphere for the week. Jean-Pierre was also involved in creating one of Club Med's most famous innovations. They've solved the problem of where to keep your money, too. No one has pockets. You buy a string of beads, native fashion, and to pay for the drinks, you just pull a couple of them off. It has been said that it was really the creation of the new international currency because it was possible to use it in all Club Med villages. Even now, from time to time, when you see articles about the creation of money, about the currencies, about the bitcoins, sometimes there's a reference to Collier Bar, which is the French name, which was created in 57 I still have the patent.

1:00:40And so when were you born and when did you first what are your first memories of going to Club Med? Well my first memory it's a bit complicated because I learned that I was conceived in fact in a hut at Club Med in Palinuro in Italy. Amazing so you really are a Club Med baby. Yes that's it and afterwards my parent was a chief of village. During wintertime, we were in Paris. And during the summertime, from May to September, we were in Tunisia, Italy, Morocco, Greece, or Corsica, depending on the place he was going. That was a dream, I would say, because when you're a child, when you spend your whole day on the beach, that's something quite fantastic, you know.

1:01:27And at this period, there were no kids. of my sister, which is a bit older. That was a good thing, but a bit dangerous too. I was a kind of child king, you know. But one of the things that Club Med was becoming famous for was an atmosphere that wasn't particularly child-friendly. The management tend to shrug and look bored if you even bring the subject up. Yet it's undeniable that the club has the reputation of being a place where, to phrase it at its most genteel, young men and women may meet each other freely. Yes, the C-Sex and C-Sex aspect for a kid is not so important. Not that much as far as I'm concerned.

1:02:05Maybe others would have seen it differently. But Pierre Xavier says if you worked at Club Med, it wasn't just one big party. Because, you know, Club Med is a very strict organisation. It's not so easy to have a tennis teacher at nine o 'clock in the morning ready, as I did once. I was 18 years old and I remember once there were 40 persons on four courts and I had to give the lesson in four languages. But that's not so easy to be at nine o 'clock every day and seven days per week, you know. Club Med branched out into winter holidays and ski resorts, masterminded by Jean-Pierre. But the company didn't become profitable straight away.

1:02:46It took a very long time. I remember my father said that at the third year, he hasn't been paid during one year. Many times the company was nearly failing, but in 1960, Club Med went into the stock exchange and afterwards it began to be a real success. Pierre Xavier went from coaching tennis to working in Club Med's head office in Paris, but the travel industry was changing around them. At the beginning, things are to be simple. There's been a post-war period. So this means people were happy with very few things, but afterwards they were asking for more and more. But the more you give, the more the prices are and the harder it's getting to find customers.

1:03:33Club Med's moved upmarket over the years as the all-inclusive holiday industry has changed. You can't pay with beads anymore. And do you still go on Club Med holidays? No more. No more. we went at Club Med with my family with the kids and so on but I've not been there for 10 years I think that's a bit normal you know when the life change and what has been fantastic in the past or good in the past maybe you can find it in other ways of going to vacation, of living At the end of every holiday there's always that bittersweet thought that you can come again next year That was Pierre-Xavier Becret who was literally in at the birth of the Club Med story.

1:04:14He was speaking to Lucy Burns in 2020. And that's it from this edition of the History Hour. No holidays for us, though. We'll continue to beaver away to bring you more first-hand memories of events from the past next week. I hope you'll join us again then. But for now, this is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. From the pioneers... We weren't going to ask mission. We were just going to do it. ...and the celebrations... You feel you have... you win. I feel it. I was first. I was first. We were so proud of ourselves, and Cameron was proud of us too. I still cannot believe it.

1:04:51It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. To the humiliations. I did cry most of the half. Oh man, I'm failing. I'm failing this sport that I love. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. It's not just about the sport. It's about all the other things that people with disabilities learn from each other. For nine minutes, you become a fan in the stands as we take you back in time to examine memorable moments from all over the world. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history.

1:05:28Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:05:35Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was their credited author, Homer, even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously. And we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

1:06:12Bye.