A theatre troupe is touring the country to showcase a performance made to honour ongoing services of the World’s oldest ship afloat, the old MV Liemba.
The German built ship is over century old and continues to be a life line for communities on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and the least of which not being thousands of Burundian refugees fleeing fighting in the country.
“Not only that, the boat is an important daily means of transport on Lake Tanganyika for traders, persons seeking medical services and others,” reads a press statement.
Availed to The Guardian at the turn of the week, the press release explains that many places around the lake can only be reached by water as a result of poor road infrastructure on land.
The play troupe is made up of a German team together with Tanzanian colleagues and covers the journey of MV Liemba from manufacture as a war ship in1913 in German, its part in both World War one and two and its current merchant and humanitarian services across Lake Tanganyika.
‘To make the play, the directors interviewed many people who are directly connected with the steamboat,” the statement goes on to detail.
“The captain who was working on it until the 1980s, the daughter of a roustabout who was involved in building the boat and an oiler who was reporting on the working conditions in the engine room at the time,” it reads in part.
The release says it is based on these interviews that the script for the play was developed.
“It looks on how people in Eastern Africa think about the colonial past and bridges the current reality of life in Eastern Africa where some conditions still remain almost the same as they did one hundred years ago,” the statement details.
The statement says for rehearsals, the ensemble of 13 stayed in Kigoma for several days and the play was practiced in public between the huts of Ujiji, the habour and also on the very deck of MV Liemba.
With the go ahead from the Tanzanian Ministry of Transport that granted an official permit for the unique project, the first performance was held at the railway station of Kigoma which was significantly built by the Germans just before World War I.
After that first performance, the project travelled by train from the shores of Lake Tanganyika all the way to the Indian Ocean showcasing at railway stations in Tabora, Dodoma, Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam.
The theatre troupe now moves to Germany where the piece will be performed in Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Hannover.
The project is supported by a cross section of German organisations including the Land Niedersachsen Internationale Zusammenarbeit mit den Partnerregionen, Stiftung Niedersachsen and the Goethe-Institut Tanzania in collaboration with the German Embassy and Tanzania Railways Limited (TRL).
MV Liemba, formerly the Graf von Goetzen, was one of three vessels the German Empire used to control Lake Tanganyika during the early part of the First World War.
Her captain had her scuttled on 26 July 1916 in Katabe Bay during the German retreat from Kigoma.
In 1924, a British Royal Navy salvage team raised her and in 1927 she returned to service as the MV Liemba and to date remains the last vessel of the German Imperial Navy still actively sailing anywhere in the world.
Liemba was the inspiration for the German gunboat Luisa in C. S. Forester's 1935 novel The African Queen, and John Huston's subsequent film version. The ship also featured in the 1992 BBC Television travel series Pole to Pole and the US released a feature documentary film on the ship in 2010.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
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