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.