The Children of Paradise: A deadly mixture
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Three decades after the momentous transition from Apartheid to a democratic South Africa, Fergal Keane returns to see what happened to the hopes and promises of a better nation. In a famous speech thirty years ago, as he collected the Nobel Peace Prize, Nelson Mandela spoke of a “common humanity” in which all South Africans would live “like the children of paradise.” In this second episode, in which Fergal Keane and Milton Nkosi, re-visit some of the places and people they encountered 30 years ago, they return to KwaZulu-Natal. In the early 1990s, leading up to the country's first democratic elections, the area was a hotbed of political violence. What about today?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The look at the stories making the headlines with insights from the BBC's global |
| 0:14.2 | network of experts. Search for the global story wherever you get your BBC |
| 0:19.4 | podcasts. |
| 0:21.6 | Fergal. Fogle, this is part two of our series, The Children of Paradise, and we've moved to another |
| 0:30.1 | region, Quasulu Natal, why? |
| 0:33.3 | I think because that was the area where political violence threatened really to spill over into a |
| 0:38.6 | civil war in South Africa ahead of the first non-racial elections in 1994. That seemed to have abated with the coming |
| 0:46.5 | of democracy, but now we have a situation where politicians are being attacked, they're |
| 0:50.7 | being assassinated again, and I want to see what's causing that. |
| 0:54.0 | What is behind it? |
| 0:56.0 | Why when South Africa is supposed to be in an age of peace, |
| 0:59.0 | political violence is looming again. |
| 1:01.0 | Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:05.0 | I'm Fergal Keen and this is part two of our series, |
| 1:09.0 | The Children of Paradise. 30. 30 years ago, |
| 1:13.0 | You shine all look like the children of Paradise. |
| 1:21.0 | 30 years ago, before the country's first non-racial elections, Nelson Mandela promised |
| 1:27.4 | South Africans they'd become the Children of Paradise, respecting each other's common |
| 1:32.4 | humanity. |
| 1:33.2 | At the time he spoke those words, |
| 1:35.9 | my friend Milton and Kose and I were reporting escalating political violence in |
| 1:41.4 | South Africa, much of it in the eastern coastal province of |
... |
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