178 african appropriations
example; cf. Noor 2004). With reference to the commercial exploitation
of anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments by the culture industry in
Egypt, in particular, comes Walter Armbrust’s term “politicsploitation.”
The logic of politicsploitation is comparable to that of so-called exploita-
tion movies, which exploit their viewers’ “base instincts” by celebrating
sex and violence. Accordingly, Muslim politicsploitation in Egypt ex-
ploited the preexisting resentment for the United States and Israel. Arm-
brust (2007) draws a parallel to American blaxploitation movies of the
1970s (Koven 2001). The blaxploitation genre, which targeted black audi-
ences, featured a reversal of common stereotypes found in mainstream
movies: black gangsters and pimps were thus portrayed as heroes, white
policemen as villains. A very similar change of perspective is found not
only in the Egyptian video clips and tv comedies analyzed by Armbrust
but also in Hausa video films in which the dominant Western portrayal of
world affairs is reversed: Osama bin Laden is depicted as a hero, George
W. Bush as a criminal. Armbrust points out that politicsploitation must
not be mistaken for propaganda because those who employ it do not use
their cultural products for purposes of political persuasion; rather, they
mirror sentiments shared by their audience. According to Armbrust,
the products do not generate anti-Americanism. On the contrary, anti-
Americanism is the precondition for their existence. Before discussing
Nigerian examples of politicsploitation in greater detail, I briefly talk
about the “visual public” in northern Nigeria, which was a crucial prereq-
uisite for the emergence of bin Laden merchandise and the way it was used
for communicative purposes.
The “visual public” is a concept introduced by Peter Probst (2008: 7) in
an attempt to question “the Wester n notion of the publ ic—or ‘aud ience,’
for that matter—[which] is primarily a verbal and acoustic one,” and to
focus on the visual fabric of the public instead. A ll forms of image-based
communication constitute visual publics. Apart from television and cin-
ema, northern Nigerian cities did not have much of a visual public before
the turn of the century. Billboard advertising was moderate. Painted
signboards and murals were to be found mostly in the sabon garis, where
southern Nigerian migrants, whose visual culture differed widely, had
settled. There was one notable exception, however—communication by
means of stickers. A lready widespread by the 1990s, these were culti-