more information about TAZARA
from WIKIPEDIA		     COME AND BOARD
THE TAZARA-EXPRESS
TRAVEL WITH
KLAUS JUERGEN SCHMIDT		   listen to the title song
"TAZARA -EXPRESS"
by MARTIN WALTERS
SMOOTH AFRICA		  
   
in the making: © KJS / 2007
TAZARA
the new novel by Klaus Juergen Schmidt
chapter by chapter for you - on the web & by mail
   
At this stage, chapters are available in German language only. Are you experienced in translating books from German into English? Give KJS a call! There may be a contract waiting for you — to assist in publishing an English version of this novel! radiobridge@aol.com
   
PROLOGUE  
   
TAZARA is the name of the famous East African railway connecting the copper-mines of Zambia with Tanzania’s port of Dar-es-Salaam. For passengers, it is a journey of almost three days and two nights made possible by China’s first attempt to involve herself in a massive development project on the African continent.

In April 2007, a TAZARA-Express is heading from East to West into Africa. It passes points seemingly without control changing its direction time and again — almost like a runaway train.

However, control lies with a mysterious stage-manager who is able to direct action through handy men within the train’s coaches. Steered as if by ghostly hands, the train is being manoeuvred through time and space, even travelling on far away rail-networks thereby touching railway stations where raw products and goods are waiting — as well as ideologies and claims to power — to be loaded or unloaded by iron horses of their time.

Whilst diving through tunnels, an ominous saloon-coach of this spooky train receives as visitors personalities of universal history who — sometimes heckled by co-travellers of the TAZARA — are made to involve themelves in a debate of their conduct as actors in business or politics coining in one way or another the fate of Africa’s people in the past or in the future.

The VIP-list of the mysterious stage-manager does contain such actors of the world game as Dag Hammarskjöld, John D. Rockefelller Jr., Leo Trotzki, Kofi Anan, Cecil Rhodes, Ambuya Nehanda, Robert Mugabe, Frantz Fanon, Albert Schweitzer, Idi Amin, Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, Philip Emeagwali ... Knowing voices, hiding somewhere else on the train, are using the compartment’s public address system to confront the VIPs.

Among co-travellers occupying TAZARA-compartments of the first class there are: — four Zambian business women returning from a shopping spree in Dubai, their goods rolling with them in a TAZARA-container — a travelling tailor from Hong Kong who used to fit African politicians with affordable diplomatic suits, now scouting for African opportunities on behalf of a Mr. Moon — a messenger on his way with valuable vintage watches to launder money for dealers in drugs and weapons — a German entrepreneur who remains convinced that he will construct another railway line through Africa ...

All of them don’t have a clue that the mysterious stage-manager has already determined at what type of rail-siding their journey will come to an end.

I am inviting private travellers & travel agencies to join me in an unusual journey: Travellers would experience African reality along the TAZARA-line, and — at the same time — would be invited to participate in the development of the story of the "TAZARA"-novel.

more information about TAZARA
from WIKIPEDIA		     COME AND BOARD
THE TAZARA-EXPRESS
TRAVEL WITH
KLAUS JUERGEN SCHMIDT		   listen to the title song
"TAZARA -EXPRESS"
by MARTIN WALTERS
SMOOTH AFRICA		  

INTRODUCTION

It smells of soot and of oil.
That’s for my nose.

For my eyes, both of it produced some trainy film on scattered glass sitting in the rusty sieve of a roof hovering over this draughty hall, each fragment reflecting a dazzling recollection of great engeneering art developed through more than two centuries.

The light of the sun remains pale within this enormous hall, in the morning, at midday or in the evening — fixed only for moments as bright white fingers indicating from above through shifting clouds of dust.

Steam first, then diesel, electricity never — no!

The last locomotives which did rest here, then did rust — they represented the engineer’s highest effort to complete a development of which the beginning was the turning wheel, the wheel!

With the advent of electricity the wheel lost its power. Oh, it knew how to use the wheel, this electricity, it would need it for its very existence, afterwards it would drive the wheel itself — may be, even better than steam and diesel, but at the end it would dispense with it, not to be used in intelligent machines anymore, would replace it with endless lines of letters and numbers in flickering computers — operating soon without a turning wheel.

The matrix of electicity driven machines will have the wheel serving for production and communication as a slave of digital codes, as a rolling misery mounted under cargo-robots.

Gone is the time when steel rails would guide rolling wheels to conquer foreign worlds.

Oh, I have studied the secrets of electricity, this is the switch which will let it serve my purpose in this hall ...

Click!
 
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