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From Our Own Correspondent: Hope and disillusion in South Africa

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The skyscraper-skyline of Sandton seen beyond residential housing in the Alexandra township in Johannesburg, South Africa

09/12/2023 GMT

Hope and disillusion in South Africa

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Hope and disillusion in South Africa

Almost thirty years after the end of apartheid, Fergal Keane revisits the country.

Fergal Keane revisits South Africa nearly 30 years after the end of apartheid; the children of Islamic State living in captivity in Syria; Germany's green energy worries.

Pascale Harter introduces insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and reporters around the world.

Fergal Keane reported from South Africa during the last days of the white-supremacist apartheid system - and the coming to power of the ANC - nearly thirty years ago. He's been to revisit the country and hear what became of its high hopes - and appreciate once more the resilience and strength of its people.

Islamic State may have been defeated on the battlefield, and many of its fighters killed or imprisoned, but what happened to their families? Many had brought wives and children with them to Iraq and Syria, from countries all over the world. Today, thousands of those children are living behind razor-wire fences  - whether in tented camps or well-guarded boarding schools - in Kurdish-controlled areas of northeastern Syria. Poonam Taneja met and talked to some of them.

And Bob Howard reports from Bremen, in northwestern Germany, about the cold, hard realities of heating German homes - which have come up hard against government plans to move the country to greener power sources. The costs of converting from gas-fired boilers to renewable-energy heat pumps provides a case in point - and may be fuelling a political backlash too.

Producer: Polly Hope
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Production Co-Ordinator: Gemma Ashman

(Image: The skyscraper-skyline of Sandton seen beyond residential housing in the Alexandra township in Johannesburg, South Africa. Credit: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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