—
resin — resin — resin ...
That sounds again like a goblin’s
train!
—
resin — resin — resin ...
„Correct, you are rolling again on
miniature tracks in a miniature train
through my African diorama …
 Like a huge sphinx, holding
back answers to its riddle since
thousands of years, waits at the most
Southern tip of the old world, washed by
two mighty oceans and full of contrasts
and secrecies — Africa‘s Cape.“
 Herr
May, that was not on our schedule …
„Well, it’s not that easy to
uncouple me, you know! Suddenly, you
preferred again this colleague of mine,
this Wilbur Smith — with his
Mahdi-story, although I had been in
Mahdi-land one hundred years before him
— in my three-volume-book!
Then, some train was rolling through the
Boer War. Don’t you know that I am
the one who almost prevented this war, at
least in my novel DER BOER VAN HET ROER.
When I wrote it for the DEUTSCHE
HAUSSCHATZ in September and October of
1879 I used parts of one of my other
stories, DER AFRICAANDER, which a year
before had been published in the
periodical FROHE STUNDEN under the
pen-name Emma Pollmer — don‘t
laugh, I had my reasons ...
What I want to say: long before the
second Boer War, and long before the
Apartheid-system was established in South
Africa — and finally overcome, I let
my Boer van het Roer say these words:
Every creature on
earth has a right to
exist and to live; every plant, every
animal, every human being, each people
and each nation is allowed to develop
according to its peculiar manner so that
on the tree of humankind different
blossoms are shooting forth and different
fruits are ripening according to the soil
they originate from and the sky that
covers them. If one people dislodges
another from its soil, if it is moving
under the sky of another one in order to
exterminate it then it has lost its
original roots and cannot find new ones
in that soil; the sun will be too hot in
this alien environment or the winds will
blow too cold — it will become sick
and exhausted, it will be defeated; it
will have to pay for the death of the
displaced with its own life …
We shall disappear from the Cape because
we have sinned against the indigenous
owners, and England will follow us even
if her power and rule grew for centuries.“
Downright
prophetic, Herr May. Hats off! Still, we
would appreciate if you could now change
the point for our return to our own
tracks, please …
„You want to meet still another
writer-colleague? Alright! ... You have
that fixed idea about railways, I know
— and I even agree, without a train
his story would not have worked, not even
if he would have been a wizard or a
squeaker.“ …
Click!
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