black titanic 103Society 1996, 1997). Only 120 out of an estimated 800 passengers survived.
The sheer magnitude of the lives lost plunged Tanzanians into a state of
shock for days. President Benjamin Mkapa declared three days of national
mourning and ordered all entertainment and sporting activities to be
suspended. Newspapers were full of tragic stories about people who had
lost their entire families and listed schoolchildren, church choirs, and
businessmen among the drowned. Sympathetic readers composed poems
to express their grief (Beez 2007). Rumors and press reports about the
tragedy’s causes immediately focused on human error. In his song “MV
Bukoba,” popular musician Justin Kalikawe accused corrupt officials (of
Tanzania Railways, whose marine division operated the vessel) of inten-
tionally overloading the ship for personal gain, putting the passengers’
lives at risk (Beez 2007). As a matter of fact, negligence—overloading
for personal gain, in the case of the M.V. Bukoba, and seeking the glory
that comes with breaking a speed record (the trope of “speed and greed”
presented in Cameron’s Titanic)—is what makes the two distinct events,
or rather their mediatizations, comparable beyond the mere parallelism
of two ships sinking with huge numbers of passengers aboard.
In the first volume of his Mkasa wa mapenzi, Mtani evokes the compa-
rability of the two disasters. Before he actually starts with the transposi-
tion of Cameron’s film, he provides a three-page “factual” account of the
historical event in nine panels. These panels are dominated by drawings
of the Titanic and her demise from various perspectives (pages 6–8). On
page 9, another capsized ship can be seen and bold letters announce “The
last night of the MV Bukoba.”^6 This turns out to be an advertisement for a
graphic novel about the tragic demise of the M.V. Bukoba that Mtani had
planned to work out but actually never finished. The written teaser clari-
fies his intention to use Cameron’s Titanic as a template: “Be prepared to
read this exciting book. It is an exciting love story based on a true event.
It is the story of the horrible accident of the MV Bukoba. Don’t miss this
captivating story by J.A.L. Mtani!” Although Mtani never pursued this
idea any further than a first storyboard (Beez 2007), others did: in 2007,
a group of actors from Mwanza produced the video film Majonzi (G r i e f ).
The video tells a love story set against the tragic M.V. Bukoba shipwreck
on Lake Victoria.