An astonishing series of documents in Sierra Leone named the Registers of Liberated Africans record details of Africans freed from slavery by the British Royal Navy in the 19th Century. There is one entry in the registers that simply says 'Recaptive Number 11,407, without name, deaf and dumb'. In this documentary mixing poetry and new historical research, award-winning deaf poet Raymond Antrobus goes on a personal journey to Sierra Leone to trace a piece of forgotten history and try to find out what became of this deaf man without a name.

Samburu county, in northern Kenya, is one of many places where it is normal for girls as young as 11 to be married, often to men more than three times their age. These marriages are additionally traumatic because the child brides are forced to undergo female genital mutilation the day before the wedding. For this documentary Lisa-Marie Misztak meets Josephine Kulea, a remarkable Samburu woman on a quest to stop these practices deeply embedded in her culture. Lisa-Marie also meets the girls Josephine has taken under her wing, who are now rediscovering childhood and getting an education.

A motorbike adorned with a zebu skull is one of the central images of Djibril Diop Mambéty's classic 1973 film, whose title translates as The Journey of the Hyena. Listed as one of the 100 greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound magazine poll, it mixes West African oral traditions with influences from the French New Wave and Soviet cinema. Mory and Anta are two young people growing up in a newly independent Senegal who fantasise about leaving Dakar for a new life in France, but how can they realise those dreams and do they really want to leave? Matthew Sweet is joined by New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani, Estrella Sendra Fernandez and Ashley Clark. Touki Bouki is being screened at the BFI London on July 27th as part of the Black Fantastic season of films drawing on science fiction, myth and Afrofuturism. The curator of that season Ekow Eshun joined Shahidha Bari in a recent Free Thinking episode which you can find on BBC Sounds and as the Arts and Ideas podcast.

Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in English at City, University of London and has written on neocolonialism in Francophone West African cinema.

Estrella Sendra Fernandez lectures in film and screen studies at SOAS, University of London. She directed the award-winning documentary film Témoignages de l’autre côté about migration in Senegal.

Ashley Clark is curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. He is the author of the book Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled”

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

In the Free Thinking archives you can find a series of programmes exploring silent film, star actors including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marlene Dietrich, Dirk Bogarde, and classics of cinema around the world including Kurosawa's Rashomon, Satyajit Ray's films, the films of Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin.

Before Them, We is a photographic project by Ruth Sutoyé and also the title of an anthology of poems in which a group of poets of African descent reflect upon the lives of their grandparents and elders and the inter-generational relationships in the families they went on to establish. Ruth and co-editor and poet Jacob Sam-La Rose talk to Matthew Sweet alongside Booker prize winning author Howard Jacobson - the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants - who has just published a memoir exploring his early life in a working-class family in 1940s Manchester where he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce before becoming a writer.

Mother's Boy by Howard Jacobson is out now You can find photographs from Before Them, We on https://www.ruthsutoye.com/ and the poetry anthology is published by Flipped Eye.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A motorbike adorned with a zebu skull is one of the central images of Djibril Diop Mambéty's classic 1973 film, whose title translates as The Journey of the Hyena. Listed as one of the 100 greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound magazine poll, it mixes West African oral traditions with influences from the French New Wave and Soviet cinema. Mory and Anta are two young people growing up in a newly independent Senegal who fantasise about leaving Dakar for a new life in France, but how can they realise those dreams and do they really want to leave? Matthew Sweet is joined by New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani, Estrella Sendra Fernandez and Ashley Clark.

Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in English at City, University of London and has written on neocolonialism in Francophone West African cinema. Estrella Sendra Fernandez lectures in film and screen studies at SOAS, University of London. She directed the award-winning documentary film Témoignages de l’autre côté about migration in Senegal. Ashley Clark is curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. He is the author of the book Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled”

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Image: Mareme Niang (Right), and Magaye Niang in a still from the film Touki Bouki Le Voyage de la Hyène, 1973 Senegal. Director : Djibril Diop Mambéty. Image credit: Alamy

In the Free Thinking archives you can find a series of programmes exploring silent film, star actors including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marlene Dietrich, Dirk Bogarde, and classics of cinema around the world including Kurosawa's Rashomon, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, the films of Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin.

The rosewood tree is one of the most trafficked wild products on earth. When it is cut it bleeds a blood red sap. Having exhausted stocks elsewhere, Chinese traders have turned to West Africa to feed demand back home where the hardwood is prized for use in traditional Chinese furniture. In Senegal it is illegal to fell or export a rosewood tree. And yet they are being logged and smuggled at an alarming rate from the forests of Casamance, through the port of neighbouring Gambia and all the way to China. For Assignment, Umaru Fofana and BBC Africa Eye have been investigating the trade in trafficked rosewood worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Producer: Charlotte Attwood (Image: A "bleeding" rosewood tree. Credit: BBC/Maxime Le Hegarat)

Queues form outside banks as people hope to get hold of the first Zimbabwe dollar notes since 2009.

How Communist East Germany tried to influence Africa via radio, during the Cold War. The West often saw the GDR as a grim and grey place, so it’s something of a surprise to find a radio station based in East Berlin playing swinging African tunes. Yet Radio Berlin International (RBI), the ‘voice of the German Democratic Republic’, made it all happen over the many years it broadcast to Africa. It built on the little known strong bonds between East Germany and several large states in Africa such as Tanzania and Angola during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s

University lecturers sexually harassing and blackmailing their students. It's a problem which plagues West Africa but it's almost never proven. Until now. This week Assignment teams up with the World Service investigative series, Africa Eye, which sent female journalists posing as students inside a top university in Nigeria to secretly record men who sexually harass and abuse young women. A year-long investigation reveals how lecturers - who can make or break academic careers - groom victims in academic settings; abusing their power to try to get what they want. Sex for grades is described as being so normalised it has become an epidemic, where vast numbers of young women have been harassed and abused.

Presenter: Kiki Mordi Producer: Jim Frank Editor: Hugh Levinson

(Image: Presenter - Kiki Mordi. Credit: Charlie Northcott/BBC)

In an exclusive investigation for the BBC, Anne Soy discovers that Kenyan women are being abducted and trafficked to Somalia to become sex slaves for the militant group al-Shabaab

In 1960, a young secretary from Bournemouth, with no scientific qualifications, entered a remote forest in Africa and achieved something nobody else had ever done before. Jane Goodall became accepted by a group of wild chimpanzees, making discoveries that transformed our understanding of them, and challenged the way we define ourselves as human beings by showing just how close we are as a species to our nearest living relatives.

Since then, both she and the chimps of Gombe in Tanzania have become world famous - Jane as the beauty of many wildlife films, they as the beasts with something profound to tell us. As one of the programme's contributors, David Attenborough, suggests, Jane Goodall's story could be a fable if it wasn't true.

In this revealing programme filmed with Jane Goodall in Africa, we discover the person behind the myth, what motivates her and the personal cost her life's work has exacted from her - and why she still thinks we have a lot to learn from the chimps she has devoted her life to understanding.