black titanic 117church Pillar of Fire, interpreted the tragedy as “God’s handwriting on the
wall, foretelling the doom of those who are given to greed and pleasure
in a world cursed by sin,” which she also observed in the “profanation of
the Sabbath by dancing, game playing, and other amusements among the
first-cabin passengers” (in Biel 1997: 97–98). The popular song “Down
with the Old Canoe,” performed by folk musicians Howard and Dorsey
Dixon and recorded in 1938 (although the song is much older), takes this
line of interpretation a step further. It construes the Titanic as a symbol of
hubris and compares the ship’s journey to an individual’s journey through
life, one that can only be saved if guided by Jesus Christ (Biel 1997). This
allegory is remarkably close to the Nyasho choir’s Titanic parable. How-
ever, the Titanic has not only served as a metaphor in religious readings. In
political discourse and literary works with political intentions, the sinking
of the presumably unsinkable ship has also been used to symbolize the
expected demise of whole societies, political systems, and even Western
civilization and modernity as such. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s poem
Der Untergang der Titanic: Eine Komödie (The sinking of the Titanic: A
comedy), published in 1978, is a complex example of such a reading. In
this book-sized poem, the ocean liner symbolizes capitalist society about
to hit the revolutionary socialist iceberg and, paradoxically, also Germa-
ny’s New Left, itself doomed to submersion (King 2004). Enzensberger,
himself a prominent figure of that political movement, disembarks and
survives its wreckage. The Congolese band’s equating of the ship with a
former mother band, whose foundering is survived by the three members
of the new band, parallels such metaphorical usage. The Congolese and the
Tanzanian examples show that ships—sinking ships, to be precise—are
good to think with, and that the potential of the Titanic myth as meta-
phorical material is no longer limited to Western cultural production. It
has since spread to Africa as well. Cameron’s movie has certainly been
instrumental in this, but—as the Nyasho choir’s example proves—not
as the only source.
On the level of marketing, the attempt to share the fame of the original
they invoke and capitalize on its success is common to all four copies. This
makes perfect sense within the commercial logic of culture industries. In
America, Europe, and beyond, the success of Cameron’s film has spawned