Escaping Eritrea and inventing Zumba

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

We hear about the lengths one woman goes to to escape Eritrea, how Zumba was invented by accident and how a giant peace statue on a Japanese island, crumbled into a ghostly ruin.

Plus the arguments then, and the arguments still over the Good Friday Peace Agreement for Northern Ireland, and a picnic for peace that breached the Iron Curtain.

This programme contains descriptions of sexual violence.

Contributors: Martin Plaut - Senior Research Fellow at University of London Semhar Ghebreslassie - Eritrean graduate Beto Perez - Choreographer and inventor of Zumba Jane Morrice - Yes campaigner in 1998 referendum on the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement Lee Reynolds - No campaigner in 1998 referendum on the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement Yusuke Natsukawa - Local resident of Awaji Island Goro Otsubo - IT worker who enjoys visiting weird sites around Japan Walburga Habsburg Douglas - an organiser of the Pan-European picnic

(Photo: Zumba creator Beto Perez. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	abnormal transactions.
0:03.0	Some kind of cyber attack on a bank.
0:05.0	Tens of millions of dollars.
0:07.0	Something I don't think anybody has seen before.
0:09.0	It's a cyber criminal group.
0:10.0	From the BBC World Service,
0:12.0	The Lazarus-Heist is back for season two.
0:14.7	It was really like in the movies.
0:16.1	Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:18.8	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service
0:27.1	with me Max Pearson the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:30.8	This week on Easter weekend we revisit the arguments over the Good Friday
0:35.6	peace agreement for Northern Ireland. Plus the man who gave the world Zumba.
0:40.0	This happened now with Zumba with me is the dream I had when I was 40, 15 years.
0:45.4	So I want to conquer the war.
0:46.6	And the strange story of a giant peace statue on a Japanese island left to crumble into a ghostly ruin.
0:53.0	I did think it was incredibly dangerous.
0:56.0	It felt cursed because it was an abandoned Buddhist statue
1:01.0	which was falling apart. That's all coming up later in the podcast. But first a story of
1:06.4	repression and escape and for this we're going back to Eritrea at the turn of this
1:11.8	century. As a consequence of the long-running
1:14.4	conflict between Eritrea and neighbouring Ethiopia, the government in Asmara
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.