4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
On 27 June 1985, four anti-apartheid activists from the rural town of Cradock in South Africa’s Eastern Cape were abducted at a roadblock. Their bodies were later found mutilated and burnt.
Known as the Cradock Four, their murders became one of the most notorious cases of apartheid brutality.
Fort Calata’s son, Lukhanyo, was just three years old when his father was killed. He tells Dan Hardoon about his family's ongoing fight for justice. This programme contains graphic descriptions of violence.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.
For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.
Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue.
We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler's List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher.
You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: Mourners at the funeral of the Cradock four. Credit: Gideon Mendel/AFP via Getty Images)
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| 0:44.5 | You're listening to Witness History from the BBC World Service with me, Dan Hardoon. |
| 0:52.2 | Witness History takes you to a moment in history to hear the amazing memories of people who were there, as well as powerful archive recordings. |
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| 1:03.8 | I'm revisiting one of the most notorious killings from apartheid South Africa. |
| 1:08.5 | In 1985, four men from the farming town of Craddock in the Eastern Cape |
| 1:13.0 | were abducted, tortured and murdered by the security police. Their bodies were burnt beyond |
| 1:20.8 | recognition. They had multiple stab wounds. Forty years on, no one has been held responsible for the deaths of the Kradok four. |
| 1:30.8 | I've been speaking to the son of one of the men, L'Canyo Kalata, |
| 1:34.6 | whose earliest memories are of his father's funeral. |
| 1:37.8 | I don't think I had been to a funeral at that point in my life. |
| 1:42.0 | I remember holding onto my mother's dress because I was afraid. |
| 1:47.0 | Lucano's father, Fort Kalata, was born in 1956, as apartheid's grip on South Africa was tightening, |
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