„Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.“

Your words, Mrs. Lessing … Well, Wilbur Smith has brought to our attention a type of person who came to know two things not known to him before as something which would bring death and ruin to his society: the train and the Maxim gun …
Aboard our not very much dangerous train we welcome now:
Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim — we already anticipate how you received that title — perhaps not because you owned some patents on incandescent bulbs? …
Mr. Rockefeller, here is someone else who brought light to the world, in his case out of a wall-socket.
Sir Hiram, you started off as constructor of coaches and instruments in the U.S.-state of Maine from where you changed to the workshop of a relative who had invented a gas-lamp ... So, light again! Later, you became chief engineer with the First Electric Lighting Company; it was during that time when you got the patents for electrical bulbs. Why didn’t you stay with the bulbs, Sir Hiram?

„Well, I also invented an iron to create hair-locks, also a mice-trap, smoke-free gunpowder and a silencer, first to silence weapons, later to silence automobiles.“

„If I may just jump in with a remark ... ?“

Please, Mrs. Lessing …

„I once read that everything invented by human beings would only be a projection of human organs …“

1877, Ernst Kapp in his „Principles of a Philosophy of Technique“. He was of the opinion that technical development as engine of cultural development would only expose what is already embedded in the physical and spiritual constitution of the human being. Once an invention is realised materially it would, from the very moment of its existence, provoke again the development and furtherance of the mind, and this continued process would finally be manifested in the system of the state as a mirror of the human organism.

„Well, I am especially taken by the fact how the development of books followed the growing complexity of technical appliances … in South America still prepared by skilled fingers as a complicated system of knots, in Asia folded or piled in stripes of inscribed bamboo, in Europe written with ink and feathered pen on parchment and bound as folio, later printed with movable letters and now, the world over, represented in digital codes.
It occurs to me that the transformation of this railway-express into a rolling stage, then into an electronic book, the offer to check arguments through own research on Internet and finally using formats of TV-talk-shows, all this reminds me of the flickering of our nerve-system which lets us feel real pain and real joy but can also create the dream-work of a virtual world …“

That is how Ernst Kapp would see it, yes … He also discovered that one tool actually creates another one. Sir Hiram’s silencer for weapons was adapted as silencer for the exhaust-pipe of cars. Today you could say, for example, television is nothing else than a combination of radio and movie. And the movie-camera combined the technique of the still-camera and of the machine-gun, isn’t it, Sir Hiram?

„Splendid observation: the film in the camera is being transported from a roll by a mechanical method which indeed is similar to the one which transports in my machine-gun the cartridge-belt. In the camera the roll has to be stopped for the split of a moment so that the picture can be fixed in a single frame on film; similarly, the belt in the machine-gun must be stopped so that each single cartridge can be ignited by hitting a needle on its back. It was a clever idea to adapt this mechanic for the interrupted movement of a film … Unfortunately, it was not my idea ...
But you wanted to know why I did not stay with electrical bulbs ...
Well, in 1881 I visited in Paris an exposition about electricity. Of course, I wanted to further my know-how with regard to making money from new inventions. Someone told me if one wanted to earn real money in Europe one had to invent something which would make it easier and more efficient for Europeans to kill each other.
Mind you, that was some hundred years after this French doctor sold his idea to execute convicts on death-row not anymore by hand with an axe but to use a machine for this purpose. So, his guillotine became during the French Revolution, if you want, a first attempt to introduce a mode of industrial production.
But my advisor was not thinking of a simple appliance for an executioner, he talked about a machine-based mass-killing-method in times of war.
Around this time it seemed to be a good idea to try the British Colonial Office which, I thought, might be interested. And, of course, a side-kick was the common language … So, I moved to London where I presented, in 1885, in my Hatton Garden workshop the first machine gun which used the recoil of one shot to load the next cartridge. In its first version my machine gun could fire five hundred shots per minute; it had the fire power of one hundred guns.“

Well, if the world should be conquered in an economical way then, Sir Hiram, you did bring together what belonged together: the mounting of your Maxim-machine gun on a train converted it into a unique new mass-destruction-weapon.
By the way, your machine gun had been successfully tested before it was employed in Sudan when, in 1893, British colonial forces helped Cecil Rhodes to conquer the land of the Ndebeles some nine hundred rail-kilometres from here.
Your informant in Paris proved to have had a good notion: you made a fortune within the following two decades. You had founded the Maxim Gun Company, which amalgamated in 1888 with Swedish competitor Nordenfelt. More than twenty nations equipped their armies with your machine gun
Didn’t we see even some on your armoured train, comrade Trotsky? Old photographs seem to show them …

„Perhaps some which we conquered from the White Army, and they got them as military aid from the U.S.A. or from Britain.
You see, we had our own splendid brain in that field, but unfortunately for our Red Army his most popular invention came too late to be of use during World War II. In 1947 he realized his idea of the AK-47 which — all successive models included — turned out to become the most looked after carbine worldwide!“

And we are going to host now on this stage a summit of the three most successful weapon-inventors of all times …

Ah, oui! — My catchword:

WITHOUT SPONSOR — NO SUMMIT …

And without successful weapon-dealer — no successful weapon-inventor! May I join the game?

... But, this is my African, n'est-ce pas? From that Portuguese Café in Harare? Was sleeping all the time up there next to his empty beer-bottles … or pretended to …

We request to be enlightened!

Well, if you intend to present three of the most successful weapon-inventors of all times then, I‘d say, you have to complete the picture with the presence of at least one of the most successful weapon-dealers of all times.
As I said already: only the success of the latter creates the success of the former — do I make myself clear?

Their success or your success?

²¹ Oh, not at all. The real „Merchant of Death“ will — if everything goes according to schedule — be arrested only in a year from now, and that will happen in a luxurious hotel in Thailand not on an African train. The TAZARA-Express, and the one or the other bus or truck on the TANZAM-Highway they are for him just something like rolling post-boxes. His clients use them to settle their payments — clients who do not favour bank-transfers, you see ...

And you are … kind of a post box-manager?

— tazara — tazara — tazara ...

Am I this one?
Which one?
This one!
Or — even this one? …

— tazara — tazara — tazara ...

Thoughts may travel freely … ghostly hour … until further notice, we are cut off from the Global Village!

— tazara — tazara — tazara ...

I am the one who sits in a Portuguese Café in Harare every day until noon …
I read my paper …
I enjoy my espresso …

Mais oui! And sometimes he invites passer-byes to his table. I was invited for an espresso …

Him, and later the young woman — both I did not know before. Don‘t they look like a couple? Bag packers? That‘s how I need them … inconspicuously shuttling between TAZARA and TANZAM-Highway … on his behalf …

Drugs? Diamonds? What is it you deal with?

With wrist watches!

Ah — the LANGE & SÖHNE DATOGRAPH of that Frenchman, with a „black face“ as collectors would call it, extra-large date-window … at least thirty thousand dollars worth, or more, that was my guess!

Watches — vintage-watches became my hobby when I quit police-service in Zimbabwe. You see, I had been a rather successful special investigator, but the apparatus abandoned me. This one I can’t repair but defect vintage clockworks I can. I buy them for peanuts out of inheritances or from rumble-sales. Sometimes they are the last evidence of a white farmer’s history, brought from Europe to Africa at the wrist of an ancestor, inherited from generation to generation, at the end mortgaged — or „expropriated“ by so-called farm-invaders.
Only experts may recognize their sometimes enormous value. For an average customs-officer they look like — well, perhaps like a somehow old-fashioned but ordinary requisite.
What I got as compensation after some forty years of service — first under a white then under a black government — bundles of Mickey-Mouse-money, I could have piled it up and turned it into smoke, it would have helped, at least, to drive away vermin.
My vintage watch-hobby helped me, first to survive, then to hunt, again, the human kind of vermin — this time as private and covered investigator on behalf of international clients. They want to remain anonymous because the activities of the Merchant of Death supported their own interests over decades … An arrest would cause shock waves through government and business circles from Washington via London and Ostend till Kabul, Baghdad, Kinshasa, Johannesburg.
That is why my clients asked me to have the man on the screen permanently. Action would only be unavoidable, so they said, if he should start to sell stinger-missiles at the front-door of the U.S.A. The hunch is, this might happen soon …

May we interrupt you for a moment; our Herr Dunkler offers again to provide some illustration …