black titanic 115ity. At the beginning, we see footage from Cameron’s film—the Titanic
about to disappear beneath the sea and underwater shots of sinking bod-
ies. In front of these images, a band member dances and addresses the
viewers, saying: “See how the Titanic is sinking.” With the next few lines
of the song, we see an image of a choppy sea (in fact, the one from Cam-
eron’s Titanic, showing the swirl after the ship has disappeared into the
sea). Synchronized with the song’s lyrics “the angels shall be saved,” three
translucent-white columns emerge from the sea, symbolizing the surviv-
ing spirits of the three musicians who make up Wenge bcbg.^13 Ne x t we see
female dancers dressed in white head-to-ankle body suits—an allusion to
the spirits of the dead, who are associated with the color white in Con-
golese cosmology. We also see translucent images of the three musicians.
They are superimposed on to images of the Titanic and its wreckage under
water. The video suggests an analogy of “survival and resurrection” be-
tween those who drowned during the Titanic disaster and the three band
members. Both return in a different form—the dead, according to Con-
golese cosmology, as newborns of future generations after their journey
through the waters, and the three members of the old band as the newly
formed Wenge bcbg. This interpretation is based on the work of Wyatt
MacGaffey (1968), who summarizes Congolese cosmological beliefs as
follows: “This world is the realm of the living who are black. The spirits of
the other world are white. They are the dead, but also the generations to
come; the fathers, but also the children.”
It also seems significant that the video clip was released following
Wenge bcbg’s successful European tour. In traditional Congolese belief,
Europe (mputu in Kikongo), the land that lies beyond the ocean, is some-
times associated with the spiritual realm of the dead (MacGaffey 1968: 174).
At the same time, Europe is a place where migrants may eventually return
as rich and powerful, akin to the spirits of the ancestors who return from
the world of the dead. Wenge bcbg indeed returned from Europe with as-
pirations to wealth and success. During the celebration of “la descente”—
a ritualized form of arrival from Paris or Brussels which constitutes an
important part of the Congolese “cult of elegance” (la sape) (MacGaffey
and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000)—M’piana and his band mates were met by
enthusiastic fans who welcomed them in Kinshasa on November 18, 1999,
with a boat mounted on a truck—an obvious reference to the Titanic.^14