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Factual: Life Stories

True stories of ordinary people and the extraordinary events that have shaped their lives.

Outlook: My Childhood Friend, the Rapist

South African radio and TV host Redi Tlhabi

06/05/2013

My Childhood Friend, the Rapist

BBC World Service - Outlook, My Childhood Friend, the Rapist

South African radio host Redi Tlhabi on her childhood friendship with a gangster & rapist

Redi Tlhabi on the notorious Soweto gangster who befriended her when she was eleven, and whose life she investigated as an adult.

South African media host Redi Tlhabi, a prominent anti-rape campaigner, tells the story of the Soweto gangster and rapist who befriended her as a child. Her exploration of how a friend could also be a monster is described in her book "Endings & Beginnings" (published by Jacana).

Barbara Smith Conrad is an internationally-celebrated opera singer, but her career started in controversy. She was one of the first African-Americans to be admitted into the University of Texas in 1956 - before that it had been a whites-only campus. She tells Matthew how being cast in a university opera opposite a white leading man led to protests which changed her life.

We attend rehearsals with a very unusual orchestra in Paraguay: all their instruments are made out of rubbish. The young players of the Re-cycled Instruments Orchestra come from a slum district of the Paraguayan capital Asuncion - where most of the community works on the local rubbish dump. The orchestra, which is nicknamed the "Landfill Harmonic", can't afford proper instruments, so they make them with materials found on the dump. 

And we travel  into the heart of one of India's biggest tiger reserves, to meet a member of the Lisu hill tribe - one of the world's smallest ethnic groups. Government conservation plans mean they face eviction from their traditional homeland.The place where the world tells its story.

Picture: South African radio and TV host Redi Tlhabi

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