Listen to our stories on:
![[CITYPNG.COM]HD Youtube YT Black & White Logo PNG - 4000x4000.png](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e43a21_da38d71844e24ca3878aeace8d6da072~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_365,h_365,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/e43a21_da38d71844e24ca3878aeace8d6da072~mv2.png)
"First episode and I'm hooked! As a resident of the village I love that the stories are being kept alive. Very well written" - "I've been waiting for someone to make this podcast! Unbelievable story, very well-told" - "Brilliantly written and narrated story" - "Beautifully told" - "Loved every second of this story" - "Following on Google Maps while I listen! Epic" - "Marvellous Nic and team. Great intro to the appropriately named Wild Coast" - "A captivating story. Beautifully told"
Episodes
Episode 11 - Lane One: John Akii-Bua and the Weight of Gold
In 1972, a 22-year-old policeman from northern Uganda ran 47.82 seconds around a track in Munich and broke the world record in the 400 metre hurdles. His name was John Akii-Bua, and that race gave Uganda its first Olympic gold medal. But this isn't just a story about athletic greatness. It's about what happens when a regime needs a symbol, and an ordinary man becomes one. Akii-Bua trained under British coach Malcolm Arnold, refined his stride on dirt tracks and police compounds, and mastered one of the most technically demanding events in athletics. He did it with discipline and quiet precision, not spectacle. But he did it inside Idi Amin's Uganda. And the country that cheered him in 1972 would eventually force him into exile. This episode traces John Akii-Bua's life from the plains of Lango to a podium in Munich, and asks what it really means to win when the nation pinning its pride to your chest is already coming apart.
Episode 10 - 187 Years: The Journey to Bring Saartjie Baartman Home
For nearly two centuries after her death, Saartjie Baartman did not rest.
Taken from South Africa in 1810 and exhibited in Europe as a spectacle, she died in Paris at just twenty-five. But death did not end her captivity. Her body was dissected, preserved, displayed in a museum, and legally claimed by the French state. For 187 years, she remained far from home - not as a person, but as an object.
This episode traces the long and often uncomfortable journey to bring her back to South Africa. It explores the science that justified her dissection, the laws that kept her in Paris, the poetry that stirred political will, and the deeper question that lingers even after her burial: What does it really mean to bring someone home?
This is not just a story about colonial spectacle. It’s a story about memory, power, and the unfinished work of dignity.
Episode 9: Wild Legacy: The Making of Kruger National Park
Kruger National Park didn’t begin as a sanctuary. It began as a warning. In the late 1800s, South Africa’s wildlife was collapsing under relentless hunting, war, and the belief that nature was limitless. From the first, fragile proclamation of the Sabi Game Reserve in 1898 to the lonely patrols of its first warden, James Stevenson-Hamilton, this story traces how a wounded landscape slowly began to recover. Elephants returned where none had walked for decades. Lions reclaimed silent valleys. And against poaching, politics, and deep public scepticism, the idea of protecting wilderness took hold.
But Kruger’s story is not one of simple triumph. It is shaped by contradiction, by communities removed in the name of preservation, by changing ideas about predators, by scientific control and hard lessons learned through fire, flood, and loss. From colonial conquest to apartheid, from poaching wars to land restitution and transfrontier conservation, Kruger reflects South Africa’s own turbulent history. This episode explores how the park was made, what it cost, and why its greatest legacy is not perfection, but resilience - the ongoing choice to protect something wild, complicated, and deeply human.
Episode 8 - Boer War: Guerrillas in the Cape
In 1901, a small Boer commando led by Jan Smuts crossed into the Cape Colony with almost no food, barely any ammunition, and the British Army hunting them from every direction. Among them was a young soldier named Deneys Reitz, who would witness one of the most extraordinary survival stories of the war.
For weeks they moved like ghosts through the mountains - starving, freezing, losing horses to storms and men to exhaustion. Every night they slept in wet clothes under the open sky, and every dawn brought the risk of capture or death.
But when all hope seemed gone, a farmer whispered of a British cavalry camp hidden in a valley ahead. Smuts took the gamble. What followed was one of the boldest raids of the entire war - an attack that armed and fed the starving commando, turned fugitives into fighters again, and cemented their place in history.
This episode tells the story of that journey: the grit, the heartbreak, the human moments shared between enemies, and the sheer willpower that kept Smuts’ men alive in the Cape. If you love stories of endurance, courage, and the hidden corners of South African history, this one is for you.
Episode 7 - Congo's Ghost: The Betrayal of Patrice Lumumba
In 1960, Patrice Lumumba rose to power as the first Prime Minister of Congo, a nation newly independent from brutal Belgian colonial rule. His impassioned speech defying the King of Belgium on independence day marked him as a fearless leader, but also made him a target. As Lumumba fought for a truly unified and independent Congo, he faced immediate challenges: a mutiny in the army, the secession of the resource-rich Katanga province backed by Belgian interests, and the looming shadow of the Cold War. His desperate appeal to the Soviet Union for aid solidified Western fears, leading to a calculated conspiracy involving foreign powers and domestic rivals to remove him.
Dragged through the streets, isolated, and ultimately betrayed, Lumumba was brutally assassinated in January 1961, at just 35 years old. His death was a deliberate act to crush the dream of a truly free Africa and to ensure continued access to Congo's vast mineral wealth. Yet, the attempt to erase him failed. Lumumba's legacy grew louder in his absence, becoming a potent symbol of resilience, dignity, and the enduring struggle against imperial influence. This is more than a historical account; it's a gripping tale of power, betrayal, and a dream that refused to die.
Episode 1-6 - The Grosvenor Series: Survival on the Wild Coast
In 1782, a British East Indiaman named the Grosvenor struck the wild and jagged coastline of what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape. What followed was not just a tale of shipwreck, but a haunting odyssey across one of the most treacherous, and politically volatile regions in the world.
Over a hundred survivors stepped ashore that morning. Most would never be seen again.
This is a story of betrayal and bravery, of desperation and endurance. It’s a story of colonial frontiers and clashing cultures, of women and children abandoned, of diamonds lost and found. Of a young Anglo-Indian boy whose suffering moved a nation, and of men who vanished into the wilderness, never to return.
Through the archives, into the veld, and across time, we uncover what happened when the sea delivered a shipload of strangers into a land already at war, with itself.
In partnership with:
.png)
