x Acknowledgments and Preface
whose clever reading of scam letters inspired my own. I am also grateful
to Jan Budniok, who gave me a crash course in Facebook, making it much
easier for me to navigate the Facebook pages of the three musicians whose
work I discuss in chapter 8. Special thanks are due to Espen Sørensen,
aka Mzungu Kichaa, and Eric Sell, aka EES, who were generous enough
to meet me for interviews in 2013 in Hamburg and Cologne, respectively.
I also express my gratitude to the conveners of several conferences,
panels, and seminars where I presented part of my work at various stages
of completion and from the discussion of which I gained a lot: In 2005
and 2006, Birgit Meyer invited me to participate in two wonderful confer-
ences as part of the Pioneer Project in Mass Media and the Imagination
of Religious Communities that she ran at the University of Amsterdam;
Carmen Birkle and Nicole Waller encouraged me to develop a first ver-
sion of the “Black Titanic” paper for their seminar series on transatlantic
encounters at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2006; and Mahir
Șaul and Ralph Austen convened the African Film conference, which took
place at the University of Illinois in 2007 and where I was able to discuss
first findings on the remediation of Nolly wood in Tanzania. I also thank
Onookome Okome for organizing with me the Nolly wood and Beyond
conference at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2009, where I
could discuss part of my work on the remediation of Nolly wood films by
Tanzanian video narrators with an audience of international experts on
Nigerian video film. Heike Becker and Dorothea Schulz invited me to
take part in the panel (Un)making Difference through Performance and
Mediation in Contemporary Africa, which they convened at the Fifth
European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in 2013. The panel
encouraged me to write a first draft of the last chapter of this book.
I also acknowledge the effort and moral support of those who read and
commented on the manuscript or parts of it in various stages of prepa-
ration—as friends and colleagues, or as external reviewers, or both—
Abdalla Uba Adamu, Gerd Becker, Hauke Dorsch, Cassis Kilian, Carola
Lentz, Birgit Meyer, Peter Probst, and Bob W hite. I am most grateful to all
of them. I also want to mention Jonathan Haynes, whose work I admire.
I gleaned a lot more about Nigerian video film from our conversations—
whether in K ano, Cologne, Mainz, or wherever else we met. John McCa l l
was so kind to send me a copy of the Osama Bin La video; Bärbel Freyer