Anchor & Hope © KJS 2005 Exposé for another fiction-thriller on Internet — featuring Gertrud Steiner & Lainet Musora — protagonists of Drums within an Ivory Tower *   JOIN THE CLUB Location:   London Time:   180 days, 23 hrs, 54 mins, 19 secs to election of the 2012 host city of the Olympic Games

... based on: "DRUMS WITHIN AN IVORY TOWER" © KJS 2005

(so far available in a German version only "TROMMELN IM ELFENBEINTURM")

The place in Africa where I lived for 27 years as a "permanent resident" is called Harare, this is the capital of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is the main showground for my thriller "DRUMS WITHIN AN IVORY TOWER", published in German language as a book ("TROMMELN IM ELFENBEINTURM") and as an interactive project on Internet & on CD-Rom. It tells the ficticious story of two young women, one a disillusioned former communist from Germany, the other one a disowned daughter of a Tonga-chief in the Zambezi-Valley. Both met by chance in early 1980, shortly after independence in Salisbury, re-named Harare a couple of weeks later. In the wake of indepenence, both were clever enough to engineer for themselves a training as press-photographers in Europe. When they meet again, nine years later, both get sucked into an international conspiracy, spreading from Zimbabwe to Europe, to the Middle East and to Russia & China. The action limits itself to three months in 1989, the year when walls between ideological blocs tumbled down and the promise of the "Red Church" for liberation movements in Africa failed completely.

The story is also about the contradiction between different modes of communication, traditional drums of African origin on the one hand and digital signals of global computer-networks on the other.



BACKGROUND OF THE PLOT:

Having survived the African adventures in 1989, Gertrud Steiner has settled as a lecturer for photographic studies at a college in her German home-town Bremen. Her friend and co-adventurer, Zimbabwean Lainet Musora, remained in her country’s capital Harare — alas, without being able to work as a press photographer anymore. The tumble of domestic politics and economy in Zimbabwe, accelerating in the year 2000 — two decades after independence — combined with drastic actions by agents of Mugabe’s spin-doctors against the media, made it suicidal to continue in this field. Instead, Lainet and her brother Paul, a former ZBC-broadcaster, ventured into IT-business, setting up and maintaining websites as a networking tool for regional NGO’s, thereby helping to empower civic society in Africa.
Both women had turned 25 when they had met in Zimbabwe in 1980, both at that time somehow clue-less with regard to their personal future, but finally tapping into funds of a development agency which allowed both of them to establish a professional career by studying press photography in Germany. Both had turned almost 35 when they met again on the mighty Zambezi-River for an excursion which was supposed to become a leisure trip but sucked them into a conspiracy whose international implications did cast shadows from Africa to Europe, further to the Middle East, to Russia and to China, and then back to Zimbabwe.
Both women are close to 50 now. They remained unmarried; however, Lainet had adopted Burombo, the little boy who had helped her to escape from the "Village of Doom" in the Zambezi-Valley, and Gertrud had been only too keen not to fail as a second step-mother of this foster-child ... (in Shona "Burombo" means: "child born in poverty")

This is the background for marketing of the idea:

— an opportunity to practice English with fun
— a chance to explore the abyss of world-history
— join the WEB THRILL-CLUB as owner of the members' CD-Rom

* "Trommeln im Elfenbeinturm"AA© KJS 2004 — Polit-Thriller on CD-Rom, interactive with sources on the web, German version.