Hello, you've downloaded a special edition of the BBC radio programme from our own correspondent.

It was broadcast on Boxing Day, the 26th of December, 2015, and it was introduced, as ever, by Kate Adie.

Hello and welcome to our final programme of 2015.

It was our 60th anniversary this year, so we've been talking to today's

correspondence about their predecessors on the program and about some of the contributions

during those six decades. In this edition, as part of our birthday celebrations, we hear

some notable dispatchers from earlier years, read not by their authors, but by other reporters whose voices are familiar to us all today.

First, we've returned to one of the grimest periods in South Africa's history,

a time when black township violence claimed more than 17,000 lives

in the years leading up to the country's historic

election of 1994. Often, hundreds of people were being killed each month. The security situation,

it seemed, was deteriorating rapidly. There were few untouched by the violence. Fergal-Keen

wrote this dispatch for From our own correspondent on the 19th of August, 1993.

It's read today by one of his successes in South Africa, Alan Little.

Death came to my personal world this week.

It took away Shepard Gopi in a matter of seconds.

He was a gentle human being,

whom I knew mostly as a husky voice floating in the warm darkness of my backyard. Shepard was the boyfriend of Paulina, an equally gentle person who was worked for the BBC for some ten years. He had a job

in a large furniture store,

had his own car, and seemed to all of us to be a happy man,

a man who looked to the future.

He divided his time between my house and that of a friend in nearby Alexandra Township.

...