Witness History: Archive 2012

The anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, died in a police cell in 1977. The South African police claimed he'd gone on hunger strike and had starved himself to death, but he had only been in prison a matter of days.
Helen Zille was the journalist who helped uncover the truth of his death - that he had in fact died of a brain hemorrhage due to head injuries. The report she published in the Rand Daily Mail showed that the govenment had lied.
(Image: Members of the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) hold a candle light memorial ceremony to mark the death anniversary of the anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement Steve Bantu Biko. Credit: RAJESH JANTILAL/AFP/GettyImages)

John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, dyed his skin black to experience segregation in America's Deep South. John Howard Griffin wrote a book about his seven week experience.
*** Listeners should be aware that some of the language in this programme reflects the historical context of the time. ***
Photo: Griffin as a black man in 1959 (left). Courtesy of John Howard Griffin Estate.

In May 1992 the people of South Central Los Angeles took to the streets in fury at police brutality.
They were angry that Los Angeles police department officers accused of beating a motorist called Rodney King, had been acquitted.
Hear Rodney King's take on the beating, and the unrest and violence that followed it.

Debra Hocking was taken from her indigenous Australian family as a baby and was placed with a foster family. It was part of a government policy to try to assimilate Aboriginal children into white families.
Photo: PM Kevin Rudd prepares to apologise to the Stolen Generation in Parliament on February 13 2008. (Getty Images)

During World War II, African soldiers were a vital part of the Allied forces. Many of them were sent to Burma as reinforcements for the British troops there. Hear just some of their memories - recorded by the BBC in the 1990s.
Find out more about African troops in Burma in Another Man's War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten Army, a book by former BBC correspondent Barnaby Phillips, published June 2015.
(Photo: East African soldiers in Burma fighting for Britain in WW2, unknown date.
Credit: Topham Picturepoint)