Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week,

Abdul Sata Edi, the man known as Pakistan's Angel of Mercy.

He'd sleep now. known as Pakistan's Angel of Mercy.

He'd sleep next to two telephones,

just in case there were any emergency calls.

He'd get up to go and help no matter what the time of night.

Also we've got the American playwright Tennessee Williams in extremely candid archive

interviews.

I think that everybody has some elements of homosexuality and even the most heterosexual

of us.

We'll hear about the invention of the medical ventilator so much in demand right now and the

deep water Horizon disaster.

It was like a crematory, like an oven, you know, I'm going to die here.

I'll never forget the sounds. People people screaming just chaos

that's all coming later in the podcast but first a remarkable intergenerational link

with a very bleak period of human history.

The transatlantic slave trade might seem like a distant and barbaric era,

but a historian has found that the last surviving slave to have been captured in Africa

and taken to the United States, Matilda

Macria, was still alive within living memory.

Sean Cochran has been speaking to her grandson and to the historian who uncovered Matilda's life story which began in West Africa and ended in

...