Blood Lands: Blood on the Wall – Episode 1
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Blood Lands is a true story told in five parts which takes us to the heart of modern South Africa.
At dusk on a warm evening in 2016, two men arrive, unexpectedly, at a remote South African farmhouse. The frenzy that follows will come to haunt a community, destroying families, turning neighbours into traitors, prompting street protests, threats of violence, and dividing the small farming and tourist town of Parys along racial lines. Blood Lands is a murder investigation, a political drama, a courtroom thriller, and a profound exploration of the enduring tensions threatening the “rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an explosive trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution.
Presenter, Andrew Harding Producer, Becky Lipscombe Editor, Bridget Harney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Hi, I'm Andrew Harding and this is seriously from BBC Radio 4. This week, Bloodlands, a true crime story |
| 0:46.8 | set in a small farming town in South Africa. As you'll hear in this episode, the first of five, |
| 0:51.9 | it's a murky tale about race and revenge, riddled |
| 0:55.5 | with twists and betrayals. If you feel like binging, the whole series is available to download |
| 1:00.8 | right now on BBC Sounds. |
| 1:03.4 | Right, here we go. The old man is driving fast like they all do out here. |
| 1:25.0 | He's trying to get home before dusk, juttering along a dirt track between parched cornfields. |
| 1:31.0 | Not scared, but on alert. That's just the way things are these days, out in the vast |
| 1:37.1 | flatlands of South Africa. My father-in-law lived alone, everybody knew it. Although his place was very safe, he is stuck to his routine every day. |
| 1:50.0 | The man in the car is Ludi van der Vestasen, a prominent white farmer, 74 widower commutcheon. |
| 2:00.0 | He reaches his farmhouse at around 5 p.m. |
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