Shumba

It is said that everyone has a story to tell. But not every biography gets under your skin like the life of Shumba, who was born Alasdair on a farm of British immigrants in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. It is a happy childhood in the grandiose nature of Africa, which is abruptly overshadowed by the violence of the civil war in Rhodesia at the end of the 1970s.

These are experiences that will shape Shumba.

Shumba experiences what a life of peace can mean when he goes to London to study dance. But even there, there is light and shadow.

His later career as a ballet dancer takes him to the world's great stages. It is the pain and grief over what he has experienced that make his style of dancing something extraordinary. But years pass before Shumba, by now a physiotherapist in Schleswig-Holstein, consciously confronts his past for the first time in connection with a cancer illness.

Anja Martens, a trained nurse and mother of five, experienced her childhood in Saxony-Anhalt in the 1970s. Old film footage and a visit to her home village brought back long-forgotten memories and ultimately led to her first book "Kinder-Dorf-Momente" (Children's Village Moments). After her second book "Gestrandet" about life in Schleswig-Holstein, her first non-autobiographical book is now published, in which she accompanies Shumba on her way to herself through her sensitive writing style and at the same time takes her readers on a moving and very personal journey into the history of Zimbabwe.