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The History Hour
Osmondmania! and the launch of Lagos Fashion Week
The History Hour
Oct 20, 2023

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

We hear about Osmondmania! The moment in 1973 when teenage fans of American heartthrobs, The Osmonds, caused a balcony at Heathrow to collapse.

Also, we find out about the first peace walk in Cambodia and how it united a country torn apart by war.

Plus, the birth of Lagos Fashion Week and how it put Nigerian design on the global map.

Contributors: Donny Osmond. Josephine McDermott, BBC producer and presenter. Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, organiser of Cambodia’s first peace walk. Parul Akhter, a sewing machinist who survived the Rana Plaza building collapse. Oscar Maynez, a forensic scientist who used to work in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez where hundreds of young women were kidnapped or killed. Paula Flores, the mother of one of the murdered girls. Omoyemi Akerele who organised the first Lagos Fashion Week.

(Photo: Donny Osmond greets fans at Heathrow airport. Credit: George Stroud/Express/Hulton Archive via Getty Images)

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Aug 15, 2026
The Mau Mau uprising and man-eating lions

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes focussing on Kenya.

We hear about Muthoni Kirima, one of the last Mau Mau fighters to come out of hiding and lay down her arms.

Caroline Elkins, Professor of History at Harvard University, discusses the brutality of the conflict between Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army, the British and Kenyan loyalists.

Next, when Princess Elizabeth became queen while staying at the Treetops Hotel, a lodge in the Aberdare National Park.

In 1997, scientists travelled to Kenya, in search of a cave believed to have been the den of the man-eating lions that terrorised railway workers in 1898.

Plus, we hear how Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga signed an unprecedented power-sharing deal to end a wave of violence that left more than 1,200 people dead.

And the heartwarming story of the friendship between a baby hippo and a 130-year-old giant tortoise.

Finally for our Sporting Witness story, we head to the first Ultimate Frisbee World Championship in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1983.

Contributors: Caroline Elkins - Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Muthoni Kirima - Field Marshall in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Frank Gillard - BBC correspondent. Thomas Gnoske - Scientist. Alan Patterson - British Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson's grandson. Maina Kiai - Chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights in 2008. Maini Schildt - Swedish Ultimate Frisbee player.

(Photo: Mau Mau suspects are rounded up by police outside the camp in Manyani, Kenya, 1955. Credit: Getty Images/Authenticated News)


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Osmondmania! and the launch of Lagos Fashion Week

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