Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, history as told by the people who were there.

This week with the Greens involved in talks over forming the next government in Germany, we remember the party's inspirational leader,

Petra Kelly.

She was a brilliant speaker and a mover of audiences inside the party and outside.

She was described as like a white-hot heat.

Also the early days of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

They were extremely provincial. Many of them had never seen television, they had never been to a big city and they accepted

whatever the mullahs taught them.

Plus the Tanker War in the Gulf in the 1980s and from the 1990s a mysterious illness in humans

which was linked to mad cow disease.

It was terrifying because with my daughter's illness nobody had any idea what it was.

I was desperate, I was angry and totally bemused.

All that is to come, but we're going to begin deep in the Amazon Basin, and this is the story of an extraordinary woman who did an enormous amount to highlight the plight of indigenous peoples, who had remained untroubled and undisturbed by the outside world

well into the 20th century.

Mike Lanchin has uncovered her story for us and Mike is with us now, Mike.

Thanks Max.

Recently I went to an exhibition at one of London's exhibition halls and it was an exhibition

of amazing photographs taken in the Amazon jungle.

Dozens of close-ups of indigenous men, women and children.

These were all the work of a photographer called

Claudia and Duzjar. Claudia is now in her 90s. She lives in in Brazil and she

told me about her story which began back in the 1970s. and she started

...