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Outlook: Liberia's Island of the Chimps

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Chimps on Liberia's "Monkey Island"

28/01/2016 GMT

Liberia's Island of the Chimps

BBC World Service - Outlook, Liberia's Island of the Chimps

Scientist Betsy Brotman used the chimps for medical tests and cared for them for 30 years

US scientist Betsy Brotman used the chimps for medical tests and cared for them for 30 years, after which they were moved to an isolated island.

On a river in southern Liberia are a series of islands with an unusual group of residents - a colony of 66 tame chimpanzees. Betsy Brotman knows how they got there. Betsy is an American scientist who moved to Liberia in 1974 to work in a laboratory that was developing a vaccine for hepatitis on behalf of the New York Blood Center. She used the chimps in tests, working with them for over 30 years - and caring for them during the country's civil war. When they were no longer needed for research the chimps were moved to their current home on the islands.  Now in her seventies, Betsy has retired to her home state of New Jersey in the USA, where our reporter Colm Flynn met her. 

When South Korean writer Han Kang was 12 years old her family fled their hometown of Gwangu. A few days later the army launched a brutal crackdown on students demonstrating against the military dictatorship. According to official figures, 200 demonstrators were killed and up to a thousand wounded - in what became known as the Gwangu massacre. That event in 1980 made a huge impact on the young Han Kang and 30 years later she has written a novel based on those events.

When reactor number four exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear site on the 26 April 1986, the fallout led to hundreds of thousands of people being evacuated from their homes. But they did not all stay away. Documentary film-maker Holly Morris has been following the extraordinary story of the elderly women who live on the site of the world's worst nuclear accident. 

We all secretly wish we had the powers of Superman. Jide Martins certainly did. Growing up in Nigeria he was obsessed with American comic characters. But he always wondered why they didn't look more like him. So Jide started a company called Comic Republic to create superheroes with a difference. They are all African. He told Matthew Bannister about his answer to Superman - a superhero called Guardian Prime.

(Photo:Some of the chimps on Liberia's 'Monkey Island'. Credit: Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images)

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