92 african appropriations
proposition that what actually seems to be set in the present is meant to
be taken as the distant past. But this is not the only “collaboration” Ashu-
Brown enters into with his audience. I propose that his film cannot and is
not intended to stand alone. It is a copy that deliberately evokes and also
relies on its template. Masoyiyata itsel f sug gests t hat its aud ience is fa m i l ia r
with Cameron’s Titanic—the film presupposes this very knowledge on sev-
eral levels. For example, Masoyiyata’s plot has many gaps; certain sequences
are related to one another only if the spectator has Cameron’s Titanic in
mind, others are barely decodable by themselves and work only by evok-
ing their equivalents in the absent original. In fact, the hard-copied Titanic
footage that Ashu-Brown cut into his film constantly echoes the original.
Heike Behrend (2009: 233) argues that Ashu-Brown not only African-
ized Titanic but also gave it an Afrocentric perspective. Five minutes into
the film, a text insert reads: “This film is dedicated to all Africans who
died when the real Titanic sank in 1929” (An sadaukar da wannan fim
‘din da ‘yan Afirkan da suka mutu a ainihin jirgin Taitanic da ya nitse a
shekara ta 1929). According to Behrend, “This dedication strongly evokes
the association of the Titanic with a slave ship and with the transatlantic
slave trade in which millions of innocent Africans lost their lives.” She
continues, arguing that Cameron’s Titanic has thus been “reformulated
in a rather subversive way” and suggest that by drawing attention to the
missing Africans aboard Cameron’s Titanic and therefore criticizing his
all-white perspective, the Nigerian movie reminds its viewers of the sac-
rifices Africans were forced to make for the sake of Euro-American capi-
talist gain. Ashu-Brown’s dedication undoubtedly reveals disbelief in the
historical accuracy of Cameron’s movie and may have been inserted to
correct what Ashu-Brown believed to be a historical fact. And indeed,
contemporary African American observers of the Titanic tragedy have al-
ready criticized news coverage of the disaster because they found it hard to
believe no black people were aboard the steamship (Biel 1997).^3 However,
rather than fully agreeing with Behrend’s interpretation of Masoyiyata
as an Afrocentric critique of Cameron’s Titanic, I argue that, on the con-
trary, the Nigerian video film shows strong evidence of being a pastiche,
and as such may be understood as a “quasi-homage to and assimilation
of a great master” (Hoesterey 2001: 4). Titanic won eleven Oscars and
became a synonym for a new mastery of filmmaking. Its director, James