black titanic 119with the Nigerian video remake, even the invocation of an international
best seller does not boost its sales.
The tag Titanic and the iconic images copied from Cameron’s movie onto
the cover of an African comic book, a cd, and an audio and a videocassette
is meant to attract potential consumers. The products and their producers
are therefore associated with an event of world history, promising their
consumers contact with a life-world far beyond the local. The ubiquitous
presence of the Titanic label in Dar es Salaam, for example, where video
shops, cell-phone centers, and city buses are named after the ship, not to
mention self-help books for the love lorn and even plastic bags carrying its
image, suggests that Titanic has developed into a signifier, evoking associa-
tions of globalism and success (via the global success of Cameron’s movie)
and of romance and glamor (via Cameron’s romantic plot)—perhaps even
of endurance and stability—for the steamship is now truly unsinkable
thanks to its myriad mediatizations almost one hundred years after its
wreckage in the North Atlantic. Paradoxically, a nautical tragedy has been
turned into a symbol of everything but catastrophe. How else can we inter-
pret a text message from Dar es Salaam, wishing its addressee a happy new
year in the name of the Titanic? (See figure 3.7.) And how else can we under-
stand newspaper reports about the biggest boat ever built on a Senegalese
wharf (Sagna 2006a), a wooden vessel 24 meters in length and 4 meters
wide, constructed in the town of Rufisque in June 2006? Purportedly, it
was meant to take African emigrants across the Atlantic to America. By
November 2006, before officials stepped in, its builder had already earned
a small fortune, equivalent to 55,000 U.S. dollars, by selling tickets to about
one hundred people desperate enough to leave the continent, despite the
risk (Sagna 2006b); the boat’s name was Titanic.