22 african appropriations
equal measure by James Bond and the hard-boiled private eyes of Ameri-
can films noir, African Film introduced an African visual modernity and
provided a stylish streetwise character with whom a readership of young
Africans could readily identify. The magazine’s language and images al-
lowed people to imagine how an urban modernity, with which many read-
ers had come into contact through American or European films, might
look if inhabited exclusively by Africans, and what it would mean to live in
t h is k i nd of moder n it y. Draw i ng f rom i nter v iew s I conduc ted w it h for mer
readers in Tanzania and from comments gathered on the internet, I look
into reading practices and some of the magazine’s social effects, as well as
the sensation it stirred up in its fans. I assume that at a time when com-
mercial African filmmaking was almost absent from the continent due
to the costs involved, this magazine of photo novels served as a surrogate
for film, as is suggested by its very title, African Film. The photo novels
of the late 1960s, with their openness to borrowing from American and
European popular culture, as well as their commercial orientation and
transnational circulation, have much in common with current Nolly wood
video films, some of which we encounter in several subsequent chapters.
Chapter 3 focuses on four African remediations of a single American
film—James Cameron’s Titanic of 1997. The film, itself being the most
recent, expensive, and successful version of a story that has been told
through various genres and media of Western mass culture many times
before, was immensely popular among African audiences, who saw it
via legal screenings or pirated videos. I suggest that Cameron’s “original
copy”—that is, the film’s mise-en-scène which sets the stage for high melo-
drama to play out openly the conflict between collective social norms and
the individualistic and potentially antisocial force of love—accounts for
at least half of the film’s appeal to African audiences. Beginning with the
Onitsha market literature of the 1950s (Obiechina 1973), popular genres
all over Africa have reflected, along similar lines, on the social conflict
inherent to African modernities. Moreover, the film’s appeal is doubtlessly
due to the fact that sinking ships lend themselves to plays of thought and
therefore make excellent material to be used allegorically. The four cop-
ies I discuss—a Nigerian video remake, a Congolese music video clip, a
Tanzanian comic book, and the song of the Kamunyonge choir—focus
on one or both of these aspects. A ll four copies also aim to capitalize on