The Documentary Podcast

At a hillside gathering in Watt Town, Jamaica, drums, prayer, and song converge in a living tradition that reaches beyond the island and across the generations to Africa. Kirt Henry is part of the community of revivalists who worked to secure Unesco recognition for a practice long misunderstood and marginalised. In this intimate journey into Jamaican spiritualism, scholar and practitioner, Kirt, reflects on faith shaped by memory, resilience, and ancestral connection. Through stories of healing, trance, ritual clothing and the sacred language of the body, Kirt explores a spiritual world where the boundaries between the earthly and the unseen are fluid. Revivalism emerges, not as a relic of the past, but as a way of life, one that carries the weight of colonial trauma while offering belonging, continuity and hope.
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Heart and Soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.

It started in the West with influencers like Andrew Tate. Now the Manosphere has gone global, with copycats from Africa to Latin America attracting huge audiences and the cash to match. In this investigation, reporter Jacqui Wakefield explores the booming industry in Kenya, where social media algorithms are fuelling a growing gender divide. She meets one of the biggest Kenyan influencers, Andrew Kibe, and his devoted fans and asks, are women paying the price?

It started in the West with influencers like Andrew Tate. Now the manosphere has gone global, with copycats from Africa to Latin America attracting huge audiences and the cash to match. In Episode One of a two-part investigation, reporter Jacqui Wakefield explores the booming industry in Mexico, where social media algorithms are fuelling a growing gender divide. She follows one of the biggest influencers in Latin America, the Mexican El Temach, meeting his fans – and one of the people who knows him best. And she speaks to some of the women paying the price for the misogyny of some manosphere content..

Every year during Brazil’s carnival celebrations, samba schools are tasked with creating elaborate parades based around a unique theme, from which they build huge floats, compose a song, and choreograph an entire visual spectacle. Tom Raine follows one of São Paulo’s oldest samba schools, Águia de Ouro, in the final stages of creating their carnival parade for their most important event of the year - parading in São Paulo’s iconic Sambadrome in the attendance of thousands of people, and millions more watching on TV across Brazil. This year they have chosen a theme titled Amsterdam: City of Liberty, celebrating the cities’ values of freedom, tolerance and modernity. It is not just a celebration but a fierce competition, with rigorous judging and a football-style league system of promotion and relegation.
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world’s most creative people.

In 2017, five men digging in an open pit found the third largest diamond ever unearthed in West Africa. It was dubbed the Peace Diamond, in memory of the brutal civil war that had ravaged large parts of the region in the 1990s – a war driven in part by factions competing for control of the diamond trade. When the Peace Diamond sold for $6.5 million at auction in New York, the government pledged some of the profits would provide solar power, a clinic, a school and a road connection for the Sierra Leonean village where it was found. Each of the diggers and the pit’s owner also got a small share of the spoils. Nine years on, Ed Butler returns to Sierra Leone to see how much the government kept their promise and to what extent the discovery really did transform the lives for those involved for better, or for worse.
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Assignment.