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Outlook: Befriending my Father's Killer

Magazines & Reviews

Margot van Sluytman

24/05/2017 GMT

Befriending my Father's Killer

BBC World Service - Outlook, Befriending my Father's Killer

Margot Van Sluytman's father was killed by a man she would become close friends with.

An extraordinary story of friendship: Margot Van Sluytman not only forgave, but became close friends with the man who murdered her father.

In 1978 Glen Flett shot and killed Theodore Van Sluytman in an armed robbery gone wrong. Years later, Glen sought forgiveness from Theodore's daughter Margot. She didn't just forgive him - she became his close friend. They tell Manuela Saragosa about their extraordinary friendship.  

Cecile Kyenge is an opthalmologist who became Italy's first black cabinet minister. She's now a member of the European Parliament, but in 2013, the far right Italian MEP, Mario Borghezio, made repeated racist slurs against her and accused her of taking away a job "from an Italian doctor."  Earlier this week, he was ordered to pay the equivalent of 55,000 US dollars in compensation to Cecile. Cecile's journey from her birthplace in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the top of Italian politics is a remarkable one. When she spoke to Matthew Bannister in 2014, she told him about her huge family - with thirty eight brothers and sisters.

Piers Cruickshanks and Siseko Ntondini are among South Africa's top canoeists, but they come from very different walks of life. Piers is a white professional athlete and university professor, and when they first met, Siseko was a poor black boy growing up in Soweto. Although they made an unlikely team, in 2014 they won gold in the Dusi - one of Africa's most competitive and difficult canoe marathons. 

There's a rather unusual museum in Japan, called 'Chinsekikan' - which is full of strange rocks. But these aren't fossils or rocks of geological significance, most of the rocks on display have been chosen because they look like faces. Funny faces, scary faces, famous faces....even faces resembling our Outlook presenters. Our reporter Alessia Cerantola has been finding out more.

Over the past fifty years we've spoken to some of the world's most remarkable and famous people. One of them was the actor Sir Roger Moore who played James Bond in the 1970s. He played the character in seven of the spy movies, making him the longest-serving actor in that role to date. Sir Roger died yesterday at the age of 89, so we were inspired to look back through our archives to find  the interview he did with Outlook in 1992 when he'd just taken over the role of Bond from Sean Connery.  

(Picture courtesy: Margot van Sluytman.)

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