Since the early 1990s Kokoda, in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province, has become a site of intense national feeling for many Australians. Thousands travel to Oro each year to complete the 96km track that runs from Kokoda Station to Port Moresby, in an act of remembrance of the conflict waged there in 1942 between Australian and Japanese forces. More than 45 years after the end of Australian colonial administration of PNG, the Kokoda Track is one of the few spaces when ordinary Papua New Guineans and Australians have much to do with one another.

In this episode, we go to Kokoda to find out what the trekking industry means to local people who live or work along the Track. What we see is that the benefits and recognition that the tourism industry offers are uneven. For some, the industry has become an important source of employment and cash income. For others, the industry has not delivered on its promises, and many local people bemoan the brief and fleeting interactions they have with the trekkers who ‘come and go’.

If Kokoda is, as former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating suggested in 1992, a place that epitomises the relationship between Papua New Guineans and Australians, this episode asks: What would it mean to reckon honestly with the complex, and sometimes difficult histories of that relationship?

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Communities across Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province were profoundly affected by the Second World War, and the fighting between Australia, American, and Japanese forces that was waged on their lands. In the years since, the Kokoda Track has become a focal point for many Australian tourists looking to commemorate the war. But there are many other communities across PNG whose wartime experiences don’t attract that same kind of attention or recognition.

In this episode we travel to one of these lesser-known places, a small village called Kapurakambo in PNG’s Oro Province. The community there describes the impacts of the war on their place, and the kinds of tenuous relationships that have followed in the years since. They also recall the remarkable tale of their ancestor, James Mamogoba, who established Kapurakambo as a coffee plantation back before the war started, in the midst of the colonial period. The relationships that he was able to forge with Australians and other outsiders, as one of the only Papuan plantation owners at that time, are held up in contrast to the absence of relationships with outsiders that his descendants describe today.

This episode asks: How is it that recognition flows to some places and people and not others, and what are the effects of this? What would it mean to look beyond Kokoda? Indeed, what would it mean to recognise the war itself as just one chapter in a long, complex history of encounter that also includes Australian colonialism? And what kinds of ethical relationships might that kind of recognition of shared history yield today?

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This is part two of a two part episode. Head to our feed for part one.

Kenya’s Nubians are an ethnic minority who found themselves in the country after having served the British as soldiers during the colonial period and in both World wars. They were originally from Sudan, but over many generations have come to see themselves as Kenyan, even though the Kenyan government has only recently recognised them as citizens.

The story of Kenya’s Nubians illustrates the impossible positions that so many people were put in by Imperial powers: brought to Kenya and used there for decades, they had nowhere else to go when Kenya became independent. The story shows how tough it can be to overcome difficult pasts of this kind. It is about the ambiguous feelings that colonialism can leave in its wake: for the Nubians, a fierce loyalty to Kenya, alongside something of a nostalgia for the better life they had under the British.

In this episode, Sam Balaton-Chrimes visits Kibra in Nairobi, the heart of the community, and talks with Nubians living there about the legacies of their past. What does this history mean for Nubians and their relationship to other Kenyans? And their relationship to the British? What do they feel the British owe them?

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