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

the past brought to life by people who were there.

This week the World Health Organization dogged by politics from the start.

The United States saw the WHO in effect, to put it crudely,

but I think accurately, as an extension of its foreign policy intentions.

Plus the American Quakers who were unlikely pioneers of eco-tourism in Costa Rica.

One morning we woke up, I heard this great crashing.

It just sounded like the whole woods was coming down.

I went out under our little porch and it was

Spider monkeys a whole troop. And we remember Christo, the man who wrapped the rice stag.

And there was five million people in the Reichstag.

Everybody who come to see the project,

they know that they were seeing something

will never happen again.

That's all coming up later in the podcast,

but first a convulsion of violence which racked a group of islands which are more usually portrayed as idyllic sun and sand holiday destinations.

In 1964, revolutionary's seized power in the archipelago of Zanzibar just off the coast of East Africa.

The revolution was followed by days of mayhem, most of it ethnically motivated, which left lasting scars. It also led to Zanzibar giving up its new-found

independence to become part of Tanzania. Rebecca Kespi has been speaking to the academic

and journalist Ahmed Rajab, who was a student at the time of the revolution.

It was a melting pot.

People were from different backgrounds, from Africa, from the Middle East, from Asia, and as far as China, and also Portuguese, but they made up

...