Theatre and Gender PerformanceWWII Italian POW Camps in East Africa

The POWer Song […] you are in bad shape at war you eat little you sleep on the floor women, unfortunately, there are none

we all more or less do the best we can. If you get malaria or typhus you still eat corned beef. Let's be honest definitely at war you are in bad shape.1

The POWer Song (La canzone del POWiere)² was one of the most popular cabaret pieces performed by Captain Mario Felli and his brother Giorgio in 1942 while detained in POW Officer Camp 356 A in Eldoret, Kenya. This camp was one of the largest built in East Africa by British military authorities to confine the Italian Fascist soldiers captured in Africa and in the Mediterranean during World War II. In his unpublished memoir How I Saw a Corner of Africa, Mario Felli provides copious details about how he used to perform the piece with "The Borodin Quartet," an ensemble composed of the two brothers along with officers Visentin and De Poltronieri, on the camp's theatre stage built by the Italian internees.

The POWer Song represented the iconic moment of a performance that began with the four men comically announcing themselves by popping their heads out of the curtain, one at a time and one on top of the other, singing "Borodin, Borodin, Borodin, and Borodin" in a crescendo. Dressed in thrown-together tuxedos and waxed, pointed moustaches with ribbons at each end, they then solemnly appeared on stage carrying voluminous instrument cases from which they extracted only small harmonicas to sing and improvise sketches. Before them stood four music stands where they gently placed postcard-size music sheets with a single large note written on them. The quartet offered a variety show of favorite Italian vignettes and tunes from the 1910s–1930s before hitting the grand finale with The POWer Song. The instant they hinted at the first notes of the tune, all the hundreds of prisoners in the theatre stood up and joined them in singing along to its rhyming lines. In the humorous mix of broken Italian and English stressed by the word POWiere in the title, the song aptly summarized the most traumatic events faced by Italian POWs during WWII: combat, camp imprisonment in foreign countries, food deprivation, disease, the lack of contact with civilians, especially with women, and the resulting endemic malaise.

Musical productions, theatre plays, lyric opera, and cabaret shows became crucial creative activities that helped Italian military prisoners survive their detention in Allied hands that, especially in the African British colonies, lasted from 1941 to the end of 1946 or even the beginning of 1947, long after the end of WWII. As the conflict progressed, Italian POWs became an indispensable cheap labor force all over the British Empire, where "they [were] regarded as a pool which Allied governments would continue to draw on in whatever way would best serve the man power problem and the wider war effors."³ POWs replaced men at war in road and railroad construction, in agriculture, and in all sorts of public and private manufacturing activities. As early as 1941, Italian prisoners were utilized above all to repair the Great North Road, the vital dirt road connecting British central and East African colonies. Thus, when dictator Benito Mussolini was deposed and Italy switched sides with the chaotic armistice of September 8, 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill managed to bypass the Geneva Convention and to negotiate a verbal agreement with newly appointed Italian Prime Minister Marshall Pietro Badoglio. Churchill obtained authorization to hold onto the Italian prisoners under the controversial "war cooperators" status⁴ until the crops of 1946 had been brought in all over the British territories.

As the number of Italian POWs in British and Allied hands in the Mediterranean and Africa quickly rose from 133,000 in February 1941 to the record number of more than 500,000 in the fall of 1943, organizing and transferring them remained one of the most pressing matters. Starting from 1941, dozens of temporary and permanent POW camps were built in North and East...