To mark the 400 years since the arrival of African slaves to America, the author and playwright Caryl Phillips reflects on the life of one individual.

In February 1766, a twenty-five year old African man, Philip Quaque, arrived back in his native Africa, with an English wife. He had been taken to England as a teenager to be educated as a Christian missionary. In England he had been ordained into the church, and married, and now the young man was to serve in a slave fort as both a missionary to his own African people, and a Chaplain to the English troops and merchants stationed on the coast. His was an impossible situation, trapped as he was between the hostility of his own people and the disdain of the English. For nearly half a century he managed to maintain a life balanced between these two opposing groups, and he recorded the anxieties visited upon him in a remarkable series of letters that he dispatched back to his employers in England.

Producer Neil McCarthy

When Miatta was 14 years old, armed rebels stormed into her classroom and forcibly recruited her and her classmates. They were trained to use machine guns and then sent to the front line to fight in Liberia’s devastating civil war. Nineteen years later, Miatta is what many Liberians would call a Zogo. The Zogos are Liberia’s underclass: jobless, homeless and addicted to drugs. They’re a menace on the streets of the capital, Monrovia, where many make their living by snatching purses and phones from passers-by. In this Assignment, Lucy Ash follows a projects aiming to rehabilitate hundreds of Liberia’s Zogos – including Miatta. Producer: Josephine Casserly

(Image: A mural in the Liberian capital called Female Zogos of Monrovia. They are sitting on gravestones because many are homeless and seek refuge in cemeteries. Credit: James Giahyue)

Redzi Bernard is this year's winner of the 'Journey of a Lifetime' travel bursary where the RGS -in conjunction with Radio 4 - awards £5000 to someone with a brilliant idea for a radio adventure.

Redzi recreates a journey her mother made in 1968 through the Ethiopian mountains to the holy city of Lalibela, often referred to as the 8th Wonder of the World.

She begins in the capital Addis Ababa where her parents met and after night of Ethiopian jazz she hits the road north, avoiding ethnic clashes along the way. With guides and mules Redzi embarks on an arduous trek into the mountains to find a vertiginous landscape, gelada baboons and children - who've never seen foreigners before - fleeing on sight.

Her destination, Lalibela, is a complex of Ethiopian Orthodox churches all hewn out of a single piece of rock below ground level. She arrives to find a scene of pilgrimage and devotion unchanged for centuries. Redzi reflects on her own pilgrimage and struggle as well as that of her mother, who is suffering from cancer.

Producer Neil McCarthy

University lecturers sexually harassing and blackmailing their students. It's a problem which plagues West Africa but it's almost never proven. Until now. This week Assignment teams up with the World Service investigative series, Africa Eye, which sent female journalists posing as students inside a top university in Nigeria to secretly record men who sexually harass and abuse young women. A year-long investigation reveals how lecturers - who can make or break academic careers - groom victims in academic settings; abusing their power to try to get what they want. Sex for grades is described as being so normalised it has become an epidemic, where vast numbers of young women have been harassed and abused.

Presenter: Kiki Mordi Producer: Jim Frank

(Photo: Presenter - Kiki Mordi. Credit: Charlie Northcott/BBC)

With the rise in ethical consumerism, Assignment explores the hidden suffering of tea workers in Africa. Attacked because of their tribal identity, reporter Anna Cavell hears harrowing stories of murder, rape and violence and asks whether more could, or should, have been done to protect them when trouble broke out.

(Update: The Supreme Court has now refused the tea pluckers' leave to appeal against earlier judicial decisions which didn’t go in their favour. This was the last legal avenue open to them in England. Lawyers acting for the workers say they now plan to discuss the case with the UN Working Group for Business and Human Rights.)

Producer: Nicola Dowling Reporter: Anna Cavell Editors: Gail Champion & Andrew Smith

(Photo: Freshly plucked tea leaves. Credit: Getty Creative Stock)

In Amsterdam’s cafes, you can buy hashish openly, over the counter. But go around back to see how the drug comes in, and you’ll get a lot of smoke blown in your face. The entire supply chain is illegal. BBC Arabic’s Emir Nader holds his breath and traces it thousands of kilometres back to the mountains of Morocco, where cannabis is grown and processed into bricks of hash. There, he finds farmers in poverty and officials claiming "there is no organised crime" in the country. In between, he joins Spanish police as they knock down doors looking for the drug and meets a former smuggler who explains how for years he eluded Europe’s authorities to bring in millions of dollars’ worth of Moroccan hash.

Producer: Neal Razzell

(Image: Spanish police conduct a series of raids hoping to disrupt hash smuggling from Morocco. Credit: BBC)

The extraordinary story of an undercover migrant and his ‘secret spectacles’. When Azeteng, a young man from rural Ghana, heard stories on the radio of West African migrants dying on their way to Europe, he felt compelled to act. He took what little savings he had and bought glasses with a hidden camera – his ‘secret spectacles.’

Then he put himself in the hands of people smugglers and travelled 3,000 miles on the desert migrant trail north, aiming to document the crimes of the traffickers. Along the way he saw extortion, slavery, and death in the vast stretches of the Sahara.

For Assignment, reporter Joel Gunter tells the story of his journey – a journey that thousands of young Africans like him attempt each year.

Producer, Josephine Casserly

(Photo: Azeteng's secret spectacles. Credit: Charlie Northcott/BBC)

Byson expected to be dead long ago. Now in his 60s, he was given a death sentence a quarter of a century ago. But instead of being executed, he has found himself back at home, looking after his elderly mother, holding down a job, and volunteering to help other prisoners leaving jail.

His release was part of a resentencing project in Malawi. Anyone who was given the death penalty automatically for killing someone can have their case re-examined. What is known as a mandatory death sentence was ruled to be unconstitutional, so now judges are giving custodial sentences instead, or in some cases inmates are even being freed.

Charlotte McDonald travels to the small town of Balaka to visit the Halfway House where Byson mentors former inmates. She visits someone who came out of jail a few years ago and now runs her own business in the village where she was born. And she speaks to one of the last remaining people on death row about their upcoming re-sentencing hearing.

Many of those former death row inmates are now back in their communities living and working – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that ordinary Malawians are ready for the death penalty to be abolished.

(Photo: Former inmate Byson sits with his mother, Lucy, outside her house. Credit: BBC)

Uganda is a country that has seen massive growth in the number of ‘orphanages’ providing homes to children, despite the number of orphans there decreasing.

It is believed 80% of children now living in orphanages have at least one living parent. The majority of the hundreds of orphanages operating in Uganda are illegal, unregistered and now are in a fight with the government trying to shut them down.

Dozens on the government's list for closure are funded by overseas charities and church groups, many of which are based in the UK.

With widespread concerns about abuse, trafficking and exploitation of children growing up in orphanages, are funders doing enough to make sure their donations are not doing more harm than good?

Reporter: Anna Cavell Producer: Kate West

(Photo: Ugandan children stand on the banks of the Kagera River. Credit: Isaac Kasamani/AFP/Getty Images)

Each year, the Royal Geographical Society in association with BBC Radio 4 organises a competition to choose the top dream travel assignment. The 2011 winner is Jane Labous, whose destination of choice was the west African nation of Mali. Her goal: to meet the men and women who face hardship every day as they eke out a living digging and diving for sand and gravel from the bed of the River Niger.

Tradition in Mali has meant that houses are made from mud, which bakes hard in the searing African sun. But today the available solidity of concrete means that mud homes are less desirable and there is an ever-growing demand for sand to help fashion the concrete structures sprouting all over the capital Bamako.

Jane travels to the little town of Koulikoro 50 km north of the capital to talk to the sand-diggers who spend back-breaking hours in 40-degree heat dredging tons of sand and gravel from the riverbed to satisfy the relentless hunger for aggregates of Bamako's builders.

But at what cost? The fishermen are outraged by the way the river waters are disturbed and their livelihood threatened; as for the sand-diggers themselves, the natural perils of the Niger - crocodiles, hippopotamus, not to mention the river-genies who must be appeased - are now compounded by the dangerous deep trenches in the riverbed that make diving ever more dangerous. Now the locals have taken out an order to ban the diggers from the shallow waters close to Koulikoro's centre where the town's children love to play.

But with bandits threatening the north of the country, the other big question on Jane's mind today is whether she'll make it to the regional capital of Djenné safely for the traditional annual renewal of mud-coating on the city's grand mosque....

Producer: Simon Elmes

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Joel Joffe. For many years he was the chairman of Oxfam, before that he set up a hugely successful insurance company and most recently he's been campaigning for terminally ill people to have the right to die. But the career in which he has had the greatest impact is the one he was forced to give up more than 40 years ago - law.

In 1963, Joel Joffe was a young defence solicitor, so dismayed by the apartheid system of his native South Africa that he was on the brink of emigrating. Then he was asked to take over the defence of a group of ANC activists including Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela.

The trial gripped the world and was all the more extraordinary because, far from aiming to secure his clients' freedom, Joel Joffe was simply fighting for them not to receive the death penalty. He tells Kirsty how, even in his prison clothes, Nelson Mandela was a figure of calm authority, who guided them through the trial.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Under Milk Wood by Richard Burton Book: A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela Luxury: Wind-up radio.