104 african appropriations
A TANZANIAN ADVENTIST CHOIR’S SONGThe M.V. Bukoba tragedy of 1996 may also have provided part of the
context in which local audiences received the Nyasho Kwaya’s “Titanic”
song even before it was recorded and distributed more widely in 2000.
A fter all, Musoma, home of the Kamunyonge Seventh-day Adven-
tist Church with which the choir is associated, is on the shores of Lake
Victoria, too, and only a four-hour journey from Mwanza. However, as
choir members told me in 2009, the song was written much earlier, prob-
ably even before the choir was formed in 1994. It goes back to the choir’s
founder, the late Kilion Otuk Angoche, who introduced the song to the
Nyasho Kwaya’s repertoire. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt
the veracity of my source, it means that Cameron’s Titanic cannot be the
template of the song. A primary school teacher by profession, Angoche
must have come across the myth of the Titanic through some other source,
perhaps some publication or the sermon of a traveling preacher who may
have used the tragedy as a parable.^7 Even though the song itself was not
inspired by the Hollywood movie, Cameron’s Titanic and the interest it
stirred must have played some role in the choir’s decision to record the
song in 2000. The church elders told me that the recording was not only
meant to spread Adventist belief but to raise funds as well.
Both kwaya (choir) music and its taping and sale of audiocassettes
began to flourish in the 1990s. According to Gregory Barz (2003), who
conducted research on urban kwaya music in 1994, modern choir music
is a blend of indigenous Tanzanian musical traditions and the dominant
Western hymnody practiced in African Christian churches of various
denominations for the greater part of the twentieth century. It is also
characterized by the use of electric musical instruments, most notably
guitars and keyboards, to accompany the singers. The Nyasho Kwaya’s
“Titanic” reflects this trend. On the tape recorded in a Nairobi studio, a
synthesizer that produces electric-guitar and organ sounds accompanies
the thirty-one members of the choir. In terms of chord sequence, instru-
mental and chorus melody, as well as vocal rhythm, the song displays
the typical features of kwaya music, too (Katharina Aue, email, April 5,
2007). Thus, the Nyasho Kwaya choir, which has since produced five more
volumes of its repertoire and was about to record two more when I talked