In February 2018, British Art Historian and broadcast Dr Gus Casely-Hayford started his dream job as Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Located in Washington DC, on the National Mall, it’s home to one of the world's finest collections African art, both ancient and modern.

The challenges are huge, and it’s all going marvellously well - until political events threaten to derail their upcoming exhibition and ability to fundraise. So the race is on to make up for lost time.

We follow Gus’s action-packed first year in office. He has ambitious plans for the museum - remodelling its physical spaces, increasing its digital reach and education programs. But he’s also striving to broker new partnerships with US and African institutions, creating a more equitable and collaborative museum sector. We follow Gus to Yale University which has been leading the way for higher education with their Africa Initiative.

Narrated by Noma Dumezweni Produced by Victoria Ferran A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4

Simon Reeve embarks on the fourth and final leg of his epic four-part journey around the Mediterranean. Taking a ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar, Simon's first stop is Ceuta, a Spanish exclave surrounded by Morocco. This is one of the few land borders between Africa and the European Union. Simon joins the Spanish border police who check engines and even dashboards for stowaways trying to reach Europe. Migrant and refugees attempting to cross Ceuta's fortress border have quadrupled in the last year. Undaunted by Morocco's failure to issue a filming permit, Simon crosses the border as a tourist, tracking down a group of young migrants hiding out in a forest close to Ceuta. They have travelled thousands of miles, crossing the Sahara to get this far, and now they are just a 20-foot, razor wire fence away from their European dream.

Crossing the Med to Spain, one the busiest shipping lanes in the world, Simon discovers huge numbers of dolphins and even giant whales surviving by dodging the ferries, container ships and oil tankers. Travelling along the arid southern Spanish coast, Simon takes to air to witness the sea of plastic that form over a hundred square miles of greenhouses. It is where much of our supermarket fruit and veg are grown, but as Simon discovers it is a massive industry built on the back of a low paid, migrant workforce. Following in the footsteps of four million Brits who make the journey every year, Simon travels to the Costa Blanca and its most famous resort, Benidorm. Derided by many, Simon is surprised to learn that high-rise Benidorm is now being hailed by experts as a model of sustainable tourism. The Mediterranean region attracts a third of world tourism and visitor numbers are predicted to rise to half a billion a year by the end of the next decade. Simon travels to a western corner of Corsica, a nature reserve that must be one of the most heavily protected bits of sea on earth, and one of the few places where tourists are actively discouraged from visiting. Lying on the beach, hiking in the mountains and watersport activities are all banned. The park's manager shows Simon the results, taking him for a dive in the fishiest place in the Med. In a sea where over ninety percent of fish stocks are over exploited, it is a beacon of hope in what is otherwise an uncertain future for the Mediterranean.

Simon Reeve embarks on the third leg of his epic four-part journey around the Mediterranean. He begins in Libya - a country well off the tourist trail and torn apart by revolution, insurgents from the so-called Islamic State and western air strikes. Simon visits the Mediterranean city of Sirte, which has been the scene of heavy fighting. Here, Simon witnesses some of the worst destruction he has ever seen, with entire neighbourhoods of the city completely flattened. He also visits the remains of Leptis Magna - one of the world's best-preserved Roman cities which many feared could fall into the hands of IS - and meets the young volunteers who risked their lives to protect it.

Travelling west along north Africa's Mediterranean coast, Simon arrives in Tunisia, a country that - unlike its neighbour - has long been a tourist destination. He visits the spectacular fortress village of Chenini, where houses were carved into the mountain by the Amazigh - better known as the Berbers. Today, Berbers are a small minority in Tunisia, but Simon finds one man who is keeping the traditions alive by harnessing camel power to make olive oil and excavating rock by hand to build new Berber homes.

From Tunisia, Simon boards the overnight ferry to the island famous as home to the mafia, Sicily. In recent years, a government crackdown and public rebellion have substantially weakened the mafia's grip on the island, but in the countryside, there are worrying signs of a comeback. The mafia is trying to take advantage of rural Sicily's population decline, but Simon soon discovers that migrants and refugees who have travelled across the Mediterranean to Europe are finding new homes in Italy's emptying villages. Simon meets three inspiring sisters who - despite constant intimidation, including the skinning of their much-loved dog - are making a defiant stand against the mafia.

Strictly Come Dancing's head judge Shirley Ballas investigates a family story that her maternal great-grandmother abandoned her husband and children for a more exciting life in America. What Shirley discovers casts her great-grandmother in a completely new light.

On her father's side, Shirley pursues a rumour that she has black ancestors - a trail which leads her to colonial Cape Town and the era of slave trafficking to South Africa via the Indian Ocean.

In this insightful and entertaining programme, Giles and Monica travel to South Africa - where they experience a land of contrasts through working in two very different hotels. The Silo is an industrial-chic, luxury art-themed hotel in the heart of Cape Town. It sits in the former elevator shaft of a 90-year-old, 187-foot grain silo (once dubbed the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa) and on top of the new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa - the African equivalent of the Tate Modern - within the same repurposed historic building. The redesign of the silo building was led by British star designer Thomas Heatherwick, who created 96 stunning windows which contain over 5,300 individual panes of glass overall and cost £50,000 each to construct.

Giles and Monica discover that what looks amazing can be challenging to maintain. Giles puts his best window-cleaning skills to use on the angular panes inside the hotel, whilst Monica draws the short straw and gamely abseils from the 11th floor of the building to clean the exterior, using a mixture of citrus peel and alcohol. The choice of waterless cleaning products highlights a huge challenge for the hotel and for the city - during Cape Town's worst drought in a century. Giles works alongside maintenance man Dean as he checks the hotel's water aerators - special devices fitted to taps and shower heads - and finds that so far they have reduced water consumption in the hotel by nearly 60%.

Whilst there is a severe shortage of one liquid, Monica discovers another is very popular in town. She works with Zimbabwean bar manager, Jonas, who offers 14 different types of gin, many distilled in Cape Town and infused with plants that can only be found locally. She cooks with Chef Zyaad, who draws inspiration from his Cape Malay heritage, and is shown the hotel's own bijou art gallery, The Vault, which features the work of emerging artists.

If David Olusoga's first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress, both intellectual and scientific, that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Advances in knowledge and technology imbued Europeans in the 19th century with a sense of their civilisation's superiority. It justified their imperial ideology. But it created among artists deep fascinations with other civilisations which in turn produced a scepticism about their own. By contrast, as European artists questioned their civilisation's 'advance', in America painters sought to capture an idea of their new nation's 'manifest destiny' in landscapes. And in their representation of the Native Americans, they sought to record for posterity the world and the cultures they were violently displacing. But this was not always the case. David show how in New Zealand one artist was co-opted by the Maori who used his sills to record their culture and celebrate their ancestors. As the 19th century came to an end, the certainties of industrial and scientific advance were increasingly questioned - many artists (Gauguin and Picasso amongst them) turned to non-Western art and culture for inspiration. And in the face of the catastrophic conflict of the First World War, the idea that progress, reason and industrial advance were guarantors of higher 'civilisation' was rejected. David ends the film with a powerful meditation on Otto Dix's nightmarish and ironic evocation of the horror of the trenches, the triptych Der Krieg (The War).

In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundamental questions at the heart of ideas about civilisations. Why have human beings always made art about themselves? What were these images for? And in what ways do some ancient conventions of representing the body still affect us now? In raising these questions, Mary explores how the way we look can influence our ideas of what is civilised.

The colossal prehistoric Olmec heads in Mexico set the scene. In a culture with no written record, all we can do is puzzle about what these images were for, whom they represented, and why they were constructed. Mary Beard moves to other ancient cultures where more evidence has survived. She looks at images that are far more than art objects - images from Egyptian statues to the terracotta warriors of ancient China that actively participate in the social world, that teach men and women how to behave, that assert power and assuage loss. Mary explores what makes a 'realistic' image of the human form. She looks at the 'Greek Revolution', the extraordinary process in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, which saw the sculpture of the human body dramatically change from a series of static formulaic images to what we now take as living naturalism. Mary shows that Greek ideas of the human form influence the way we look to this day.

The first film by Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself.

The film opens with Simon's passionate endorsement of the creative spirit in humanity and the way in which art can help to forge the civilised life. Civilisation may be impossible to define, but its opposite - evidenced throughout history in the human urge to destroy - is all too evident whenever and wherever it erupts. Simon Schama explores the remote origins of human creativity with the first known marks made some 80,000 years ago in South African caves - marks which were not dictated merely by humanity's physical needs. He marvels at the later cave works - shapes of hands, in red stencils on the walls of caves, and at the paintings of bison and bulls, and Stone Age carvings.

As time passes, the elements of civilisation are assembled - written language, codes of law, and expressions of warrior power forged in metals. And humanity begins to produce art not just for ritual, as Simon discovers in Minoan civilisation. But how do such cultures arise and how do they fall? Simon travels to the civilisations of Petra in the Middle East and the Maya in Central America to explore those questions. He finds that ultimately civilisations depend on humanity's relationship with the environment for their survival, and while all believe in their own continuity, all are doomed to fall.

Citizen Khan star Adil Ray identifies as Brummie, British, Muslim, Pakistani and African - his mum came to England from newly independent Kenya with her family in 1967. Heading back to east Africa, Adil traces his mixed Asian and African ancestry across Kenya to Uganda.

On the trail of rumours of a link to African royalty, Adil meets African relatives for the first time in the traditional kingdom of Buganda and is amazed to discover the truth about his lineage.

Actor Charles Dance has made his name playing aristocrats, including Tywin Lannister in HBO's Game of Thrones. But the upstairs world Charles inhabits on screen is nothing like his own background as his mum was an under house parlour maid. Charles wants to know if he comes from a long line of servants or if he can uncover some grander origins.

He is also determined to learn about his dad, who died when Charles was four. Charles knows hardly anything about him, not even when he was born. Charles's search for information takes him to the other side of the world to meet close relatives he never knew he had.

Francine Stock attempts to pin down the alluring yet elusive quality of charisma 9.The Nelson Effect The charisma of humility and service in Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama

Throughout the series, Francine Stock has been fascinated to learn that charisma is an amoral quality - value-free, neither positive nor negative in itself, with the potential to do good or harm depending on those who harness it. In the previous episode, she considered the appalling impact of Hitler's "dark charisma".

She now turns to two 21st century individuals who have used their charisma to serve their people: Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

Francine talks with Moeletsi Mbeki, Deputy Chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, who knew Nelson Mandela well and who anatomises his particularly powerful type of charisma. And she hears from Jas Elsner, who has worked closely with the Dalai Lama, and who explains how his religious upbringing and belief underpin his charisma.

In an era in which the casual use of the term charisma has proliferated, Professor John Potts - who recently came across an advertisement for a "charismatic sandwich" (one in which the lettuce was particularly crisp) - discusses the importance of authenticity in the truly charismatic.

Producer: Beaty Rubens.

The wild Hamadryas baboons of Ethiopia have a friend in biologist Mat Pines. They even pick the nits from his hair. He's been studying and living with them for five years in the remote and arid Awash National Park. Now in Mat's final year, we follow the fortunes of his favourite baboon, Critical, as he tries to find a family and fend off his aggressive male rivals.

But the local gun-toting Afar tribe have a traditional hatred of the baboons. Before Mat leaves, he hopes to broker a peace between the baboons and the tribe.

Jenny Cuffe investigates how British-based Somalis are being lured into fighting for the al-Qaeda-linked Islamists of al-Shabaab.

There have been consistent rumours that dozens, perhaps scores of British-based Somali men have travelled to Somalia to join the militant Islamist group which was banned by the British Government earlier this year.

In September the rumours were given new urgency when the Director of MI5, Jonathan Evans, warned it was only a matter of time before the UK suffered an act of terrorism committed by al-Shabaab-trained Britons.

File on 4 explores the techniques used by Al-Shabaab to persuade young members of the 250,000-strong British Somali community to sign up for Jihad in Somalia. Members of the close-knit and reticent British Somali community tell Jenny Cuffe of their fears that youngsters are being seduced through the internet and by shadowy recruiting sergeants for the Horn of Africa's most feared military force.

And the programme travels to the state of Minnesota to see how a vigorous FBI investigation and cooperation from the Somali community have laid-bare a pipeline which first lured, then transported young American Somalis to the training camps and battlefields of Somalia.

Producer: Andy Denwood.

With record gold prices stimulating demand, Jenny Cuffe reports from the Democratic Republic of Congo on the scale of illegal mining and asks if the industry does enough to ensure that gold supplies aren't being used to fund conflict.

Grant Ferrett investigates whether the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Britain and Europe are adequate to stop wealth being channelled out of the country by people close to the Mugabe government.