84

S

Black Titanic

PIRATING THE WHITE STAR LINER

3

T h i s c h a p t e r f o c u s e s on four African appropriations of the Hol-
lywood movie Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), which at the time of its
release in 1997, set a new benchmark for Holly wood filmmaking. It was
the first film ever made whose budget reached an incredible 200 million
U.S. dollars and whose box office receipts totaled 1.8 billion. Having won
eleven Oscars, the movie still ranks among the three most successful films
ever made (Parisi 1998: 223). Cameron’s preoccupation with size (Keller
1999) echoes the nature of the historical R.M.S. Titanic itself, which like
the movie, broke a number of records in terms of size, luxury, and cost at
the time of her construction. The Titanic’s foundering on April 15, 1912,
during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City,
turned the ship into a myth and, in a sense, made her “unsinkable” after
all (Howells 1999). The film, unlike the historical ship, was not only kept
afloat but even “floated triumphantly,” wrote one of its American critics
(Bernstein 1999: 16). That is perhaps something like the irony of history.
Cameron’s film has since become a signifier of success—in the Global
North and no less in the Global South, as is aptly demonstrated by the
examples I discuss in this chapter.
I argue that the four African appropriations—a Nigerian video remake,
a Tanzanian comic book and Adventist choir’s song, and a Congolese