4 african appropriations
The cassette which I bought in 2006 in Dar es Salaam and which in-
spired me to travel, in search of the composer and the singers of the Titanic
song, all the way to Musoma, a small town situated on the shores of Lake
Victoria, turned out to be a veritable catalyst of contact in its own right.
Not only did it bring me directly to those who had produced the song, it
also connected the American film industry to the Tanzanian music busi-
ness, a founding myth of Western modernity to apocalyptic Adventist
belief, and in the process, linked a tragedy far removed in space and time
to a very recent disaster close by. On my way to Musoma, I passed the
cemetery where a number of those lie buried who drowned in May 1996
when the ferry M.V. Bukoba sa n k on L a ke V ic tor ia nea r Mwa n z a, cla i m i ng
about 700 lives. This disaster not only provided the local context of recep-
tion for Cameron’s film (which came out only a year later) but also for the
production and reception of local appropriations of that film, such as the
song by the Kamunyonge choir. W hile talking to members of the church
board, I learned that two German missionaries, who in 1909 founded a
mission station at nearby Majita, had brought Adventism to this part of
Tanzania. Actually, the centenary of this founding was to be celebrated
the very weekend after my visit. Here I stood, or rather sat, for as guest of
honor I had been placed at a table next to the head of the church elders,
and I felt somehow uncomfortable: a German anthropologist in a “contact
zone” of sorts, attempting to unravel the multiple layers of contact and
copy and copy and contact embodied in a simple audiocassette, its jacket,
and its musical content. Part of my answer to the task of unraveling this
particular web of contacts is to discuss it in connection with cases that
are somehow similar but different enough to broaden the picture. The
Titanic adaptations, which I cover in more detail in chapter 3, are part of
the much broader sphere of the mediation of cultural difference that takes
shape in and through various genres of African popular media. I explore
such mediations of difference in this book.
MEDIA AND MEDIATIONMedia came rather late to anthropology as a new field of inquiry. Dur-
ing the greater part of the twentieth century, anthropologists were almost