black titanic 109Na watu waenda kuangamia And human beings are going to
perish
Na watu waenda kuangamia And human beings are going to
perish^9The references to the end of the world—likewise found in several of the
eleven other songs on the tape, such as Dunia yafika mwisho (The world has
come to an end), Sasa ni wakati (Now is the time), and Zipo ishara nyingi
(There are many signs)—make up the Adventist core of the song. Seventh-
day Adventism, so-called after its observance of Saturday, the original
Judeo-Christian seventh day of the week, as the day of rest and worship,
is rooted in nineteenth-century North American Protestant revivalism.
It emphasizes the imminent return of Jesus Christ and considers itself
to be a “remnant”—“a movement consisting of God’s faithful end-time
people called out of ‘every nation, tribe, language and people’ (Revelation
14:6)” (Höschele 2007: 1). Adventist missionary activity, which resulted
in the church’s arrival in Tanganyika in 1903, has been driven by the cen-
tral motive of “warning the world” of God’s impending judgment. The
Nyasho Kwaya song shows that the denominational task, which around
1900 was defined “as conveying the ‘last message’ to the perishing human
race” (Höschele 2007: 28), was still intact by the year 2000. Since German
missionaries founded the Majita mission station in 1909, the Adventist
doctrine has gained considerable ground in Tanzanian territory, and the
northeastern part of the lake region has become a particular stronghold
in the process.
Stefan Höschele (2007), who published a detailed study on the his-
tory of Adventism in Tanzania, mentions two types of reasoning within
Adventist missionary activity: while many believed that Christ’s Second
Coming depended on the successful accomplishment of the task at hand,
others were convinced “that the end was so impending that they had to
snatch away perishing souls from the grasp of the evil one” (440). The lat-
ter conviction may have laid the foundation for an “apocalyptical mood”
among Tanzanian Adventists expressed in an “enormous” quantity of
statements throughout the history of Tanzanian Adventism (438–439).
Adventism at large inherited this kind of belief from the North Ameri-
can Millerite movement, whose end-of-days speculations and prophetic