Hello this is from our own correspondent a download from the BBC.

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and there's a daily airing of from our own correspondent on the BBC World Service.

But now the latest edition as broadcast on BBC Radio 4

and it's introduced by Kate A.D. A white farmer sits in the Vice President's

chair in Zambia. Does it signal a new future for Africa's white population?

46 meters above the South China Sea. We find out how economic hard times are affecting life on the ocean wave. There's an incident in Afghanistan's high

Pamir as our man is dragged feet first into a freezing river and why lovers of

soft-boiled eggs should steer well clear of a certain police canteen in Berlin.

Another page in South Africa's eventful modern history was written this week,

as the country's main opposition party made a

decisive break with its past. The Democratic Alliance which grew out of the white

liberal opposition to apartheid elected a black woman Lin Dieuay Mazzibucco, as its leader in Parliament.

Her elections being seen as an indication of the extent to which the opposition has shaken

of its white image, 17 years after the arrival of black majority rule.

And yet to the north in Zambia there's been contrasting news.

The country recently chose a white vice president, the first white man to rise to such a

position in post-colonial Africa. These developments have prompted our

former Africa correspondent Fergel-Keen, who's just back from Zambia, to reflect on the future of the white Africans.

In isolated farmhouses, on big plantations, in small towns, sleeping in fan-cooled rooms or in the swelter of thatched huts, the

planters and their workers didn't hear the end creeping towards them through the

elephant grass and coffee bushes. There had its troube in trouble that might have forewarned them,

...