A night to fall

Stories of resistance between Burundi and Germany. Transcultural Music Theater

In 1901 the Prussian government appointed the Silesian Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen as governor of the German East Africa colony. In the Kingdom of Burundi, the German military and the Burundian Ingabo warriors of the Abadasigana army then fought bitter battles for seven years. In the end, the language of machine guns prevailed and the uprising was crushed.

In modern-day Burundi, the dances and songs of the Ingabo warriors are legendary. In Germany, on the other hand, hardly anything is known about this chapter of their own colonial history.

The Ingabo - A night to fall is a transcultural music theater piece in which artists from Burundi and Germany tell stories of resistance together. They show the devastation of German colonization in the form of a re-enactment of the Abadasigana uprising and at the same time examine the perspective of the Germans at the end of the 19th century. They are also looking for parallels to another history of resistance - the uprising of the Silesian weavers, which the author Gerhart Hauptmann commemorated in his famous play Die Weber in 1892.

The project is a co-production of Kommen und Gehen – Das Sechsstädtebundfestival! with Umunyinya asbl Bujumbura and the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater Görlitz-Zittau and premiered on March 31, 2023 in Bujumbura, Burundi.