The fall of Col Gaddafi nine years ago unleased chaos in North Africa, which Egypt fears could spill over.

The Confederation of African Football 'cancels' its $1bn television and marketing deal with Lagardere Sports, who will fight to enforce the contract.

The new Chinese Mombasa–Nairobi railway has finally overturned over 100 years of history by replacing the British-built Uganda Railway - the most strategically important conduit in the scramble for Africa. Cutting the time between Mombasa and Nairobi from 10 hours to 4.5 hours. Chinese interests may be at the centre of these investments - but the impact is regional, how is the Kenyan population benefiting from this new service?

Presenter: Larry Madowo and Peter Shevlin

(Photo: The inaugural journey of the Standard Gauge Railway, from Mombasa to Nairobi, Kenya, on May 30, 2017 Credit: Getty Images)

In 1961, the British run territories of Northern and Southern Cameroons in West Africa were given a vote to decide their future. They could choose either to become part of Nigeria, or to become part of Cameroon. They were not given the choice of becoming their own country. The decision taken in that referendum would lay the seeds for the conflict which erupted in Cameroon's English speaking region in 2016. Alex Last spoke to the Cameroonian historian Prof. Verkijika Fanso about his memories of the crucial vote which decided the fate of his country.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa crowned himself Emperor of the Central African Republic in a lavish ceremony on the 4th of December 1977. He'd already been President for several years since taking power in a military coup - but he wanted more. Janet Ball has spoken to one of his sons, Jean-Charles Bokassa, and to a French journalist, about the events of that day. Photo: Jean-Bédel Bokassa, stands in front of his throne after crowning himself. 04 December 1977 in Bangui. (Credit: Pierre Guillaud/AFP/Getty Images)

Afua Hirsch examines the principle of self-determination, which Franklin Roosevelt insisted on including in the Atlantic Charter. It was a powerful force behind the liberation struggles which peaked in the 1950s and '60s as a wave of decolonisation swept the world and countries such as Tunisia, Jamaica, Nigeria and Guyana achieved independence. But it is not the same as a right to separate and form your own country, as the Catalans have recently been reminded. And it has a forgotten dark side as a justification for population transfer, going back to 1923 when Greece and Turkey agreed to uproot two million people in a forced population exchange.

Presenter: Afua Hirsch Producer: Lucy Bailey

(Photo: Illustration of a knitted ball resembling Earth unravelling. Credit: Nadia Akingbule)

At the start of World War One, British and German colonial forces went into battle in East Africa. Tens of thousands of African troops and up to a million porters were conscripted to fight and keep the armies supplied. Alex Last brings you very rare recordings of Kenyan veterans of the King's African Rifles, talking about their experiences of the war. The interviews were made in Kenya in the early 1980s by Gerald Rilling with the help of Paul Kiamba.

Photo: Locally recruited troops under German command in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (then part of German East Africa), circa 1914. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

An eyewitness account of a discovery that changed Nigerian history. Chief Sunday Inengite was 19 years old when prospectors from the Shell D'Arcy oil company first came to his village of Oloibiri in the Niger Delta in search of crude oil. It was there in 1956, that commercial quantities of oil were first discovered more than 3km below ground. It marked the start of Nigeria's huge oil industry, but it came at a cost for villages in the Niger Delta. Alex Last spoke to Chief Sunday Inengite about his memories of those days and the impact oil had on his community.

Photo: An oil worker watches over the drilling at of an oil well in Nigeria (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

In October 1984, one of South Africa's most well-known human rights activists, Desmond Tutu, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to apartheid. Two years later he became the first black head of the Anglican church in Southern Africa. Archbishop Tutu's friend and former deputy, Bishop Michael Nuttall, has been telling Louise Hidalgo about those milestones on the road to a new multi-racial South Africa, and about his friend's irrepressible spirit.

Picture: Desmond Tutu in Washington addressing a US House Subcommittee hearing on apartheid shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (Credit: David Tulls/AFP/Getty Images)

In 2008 when the financial systems of the world’s richest countries crashed, others did not. Asian nations, especially China, bounced back quickly from the crisis, and were able to capitalise on their financial power to build up their reputation as global players. Professor Ian Goldin looks at how this has led to a shift in power from West to East, the ripples of which can be seen in everything from the founding of the G20, to Chinese foreign investment in Africa, to a rise in confidence in developing countries. With this massive change in world power still underway, should we be worried or excited? Professor Goldin hears from guests including Amnesty International secretary general Kumi Naidoo, head of the IMF Christine Lagarde, professor of public policy at the National University of Singapore Kishore Mahbubani, and former World Bank managing director and finance minister of Nigeria Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

In 1991, rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked Sierra Leone from Liberia, backed by Charles Taylor, a warlord who later became Liberia's president. Their target was the rich alluvial diamond fields of Kono District, which would not only provide them with personal wealth, but facilitate the purchase of arms.

Amongst the catalogue of horrors that emanated from Sierra Leone in the decade-long civil war that followed was the forcible conscription of children, some as young as seven years old. Kidnapped by rebel forces or drawn into the Government's army, they were forced to become soldiers, human shields, spies and sex slaves.

The lowest point came on January 6 1999, when the rebels entered Freetown and began razing the city. In a hellish two-week period, thousands suffered amputation and more than 6,000 were killed. Eventually the rebel forces were driven out of Freetown by West African peacekeepers, but they also carried out despicable acts against the civilians they were supposed to be protecting.

Joining Sue MacGregor around the table to look back at the war and the subsequent pursuit of justice are Emmy-award winning camera-man Sorious Samura, who risked his life to film the systematic murder of his countrymen (his film Cry Freetown shocked the UN into sending 17,000 peacekeepers); former British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone Peter Penfold, who found himself as right-hand man to President Kabbah; Martha Khanu who was a teenager living in the north of the country when fighting broke out, and social activist Zainab Bangura, who spoke out against the atrocities committed during the war.

Producer Emily Williams

Series Producer David Prest

A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4.

Beginning with a few solo notes from a group of birds (including sparrow doves and finches) before the first light of day and ending with the sounds of the wind in the darkness of the night, wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson presents a journey in sound from dawn to dusk in the Namib Desert in southern Africa. The Namib is dominated by two features; the sand and the wind. Both of these are constantly shifting and changing and so too are the sounds they produce. The wind is hugely significant to the local community, the San, for whom it is linked with ideas of the spirit and breath of life and with scents and smells. The wind is a carrier of messages. There are good winds and bad winds. The sounds carried on the wind are an aural guide to life in the landscape. The wind of course carries other sounds with it, and as on the Plains (the first programme in this series), local people use sound to survive here; to identify the whereabouts of predators and prey. What is also fascinating about the desert are the micro-sounds that you can hear, including sand grains being blown by the wind, ants scurrying inside an acacia tree, and the slither of a side-winder snake as it buries itself in the dune. Then there are louder sounds, like the Namaqua Sandgrouse which gather to drink and bathe, or the night chorus of barking geckos; small reptiles that live in individual burrows which they use to amplify their songs, which then ring out across the desert and into the night. And all the time, there is the wind, the sand and the eerie shifting sounds of the dunes.

Anu Anand on how vinegar and a head torch are used to tackle cervical cancer in Tanzania

Sue MacGregor meets people involved in the Victoria Climbie Inquiry, the catalyst for widespread reforms to child protection.

Victoria Climbie was just eight years old when she died in February 2000, after months of abuse at the hands of her Great Aunt. A pathologist recorded 128 separate injuries to her body, saying it was the worst case of deliberate harm he had ever dealt with.

Pictures of the smiling little girl from the Ivory Coast filled the newspapers. She had been sent to Britain for a better life. How could such appalling torture have gone unnoticed? What made the tragedy worse was the number of missed opportunities to save her. In the eleven months that Victoria lived in Britain, she came into contact with three housing authorities, four social services departments, two police child protection teams and the NSPCC, and was admitted to two different hospitals.

The government ordered an inquiry to examine what went wrong and consider how such a tragedy could be prevented from happening in the future. Its 108 recommendations prompted widespread reforms to child protection and social worker training.

Among Sue MacGregor's guests recalling the inquiry and its impact are its Chair, Lord Laming, and Neil Garnham, Counsel to the Inquiry and now a High Court Judge.

Presenter: Sue MacGregor Producer: Deborah Dudgeon Series Producer: David Prest

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Sue MacGregor reunites five people who were at the centre of the dramatic events outside the Libyan Embassy in central London in 1984.

At 5' 2", Yvonne Fletcher battled to fulfil a childhood ambition to become a police officer. Superfletch, as she was dubbed by colleagues, achieved her dream as a community officer with the Metropolitan Police and, in doing so, became the shortest police officer in Britain. She was due to marry a fellow officer.

On a spring morning in April 1984, she was sent to man an anti-Gaddafi demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in London. She was gunned down during the protest and pronounced dead several hours later on the operating table.

The Embassy had recently been taken over by the Committee of Revolutionary Students and renamed the Libyan People's Bureau. They were fiercely loyal to their leader, the notorious "mad dog of the Middle East", Colonel Gaddafi, and targeted Libyan dissidents in the UK.

Sue and her guests look back on what, at the time, was the longest police siege in British history.

Oliver Miles was only a few months into his new post as British Ambassador in Tripoli. PC John Murray was working alongside WPC Fletcher and travelled in the ambulance with her as she was dying. Detective Superintendent Colin Reeve stepped up to run the police command centre, working 12 hours a day throughout the 11-day siege. Adel Mansouri was a Libyan student who travelled from Manchester to what he believed would be a peaceful demonstration. He was also shot.

They discuss why warnings about threatened violence weren't passed to police on the ground, why the so-called Embassy still enjoyed diplomatic status, and whether Yvonne Fletcher's death could have been avoided.

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Sue MacGregor brings together those who played a key role during the bitter wrangling which led to Zimbabwe's independence in April 1980.

Rhodesia was Britain's last colony in Africa. By the early 1960s, 200,000 white settlers still dominated the country's three million black population. In 1965, civil war broke out between the white Rhodesian forces and the guerrilla armies of the two rival black nationalist parties, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU).

Over the next fifteen years, the war escalated as the nationalist movement gained massive momentum.

When Margaret Thatcher came into power in 1979, she inherited the crisis. To the surprise of many she called for all-party negotiations which would lead to the first independent elections. It was her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, who devised a plan and persuaded the various parties to negotiate.

What followed was three months of nerve wracking talks. "Every moment of those talks I thought the whole thing might fall apart," recalls Lord Carrington. By the skin of their teeth, an agreement was signed and, in February 1980, polling opened which would lead to a landslide victory for Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party and independence for a newly named Zimbabwe.

Sue is joined by Lord Carrington, former Conservative Foreign Secretary; Dumiso Dabengwa who was head of intelligence for the military wing of ZAPU; Dzingai Mutumbuka, the youngest member of the ZANU-PF delegation; Dennis Norman who was President of the Rhodesia National Farmers' Union; and historian and Africa correspondent Martin Meredith.

Producer: Sarah Cuddon Series Producer: David Prest A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Sue MacGregor gathers together a group of Asians who were forced to flee from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972.

Manzoor Moghal was a businessman and a prominent member of the Asian community when he was forced to leave; Tahera Aanchawan was training to become a physiotherapist; Councillor Ravi Govindia, now leader of Wandsworth Council, was completing his A levels; Chandrika Joshi, now a dentist, was 14 years old when her family were expelled; and the writer and broadcaster Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was a young student at the time.

Asians had first arrived in Uganda in the late 19th century under British colonial rule. They prospered in trade, business and the professions and, by 1972, they were at the centre of the Ugandan economy. But when Amin came to power he declared they were "bloodsuckers." He claimed he'd had a dream in which God had ordered him to expel all the Asians from Uganda. He stated Britain should take responsibility for any Asian with British citizenship and gave them 90 days to leave.

As the Asians made urgent plans, stories emerged of looting and attacks by Amin's army. Houses and shops were abandoned. Each family was allowed to take just £50 in cash and two suitcases with them.

British Prime Minister Edward Heath agreed Britain should accept all those with British passports. A resettlement board was set up to help the Asians find accommodation, but many faced hostility from those supporting Enoch Powell's anti-immigration campaign. Despite often high levels of education, they were forced to take whatever work they could find. Many took factory jobs and others started their own businesses but, in the next few years, the Ugandan Asians changed the face of urban Britain.

Producer: Sarah Cuddon A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4.

Andy Day and Kip the cat go all around the world in search of weird and wonderful animals.

Andy and Kip visit Tanzania in Africa in search of the Jackson's chameleon. Chameleons are experts in camouflage and in order to find them, Andy has to put on a special camouflage costume of his own that Kip has made for him. The costume helps him to get really close to a chameleon, and Andy watches in amazement as it catches an insect with a superlong sticky tongue.