An uprising in South Africa and an exodus in the Caucasus

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Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Professor Rachel E. Johnson, Professor of Modern African History at Durham University in the UK. We begin with the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, which became a defining symbol of youth resistance to apartheid. We hear from one of the students who took part in the protest, which was violently suppressed by South African security forces in June 1976. Then we have the harrowing account of an ethnic Georgian poet who fled his home in Abkhazia when the breakaway region was engulfed in war in 1993. We also hear from one of the Greek Cypriot women who, in 1987, marched…