br anding bin laden 181Their reassemblages follow the local tradition of sign painting. Tobias
Wendl (2002: 18) characterizes the aesthetics of this tradition as an “aes-
thetics of economy and simplicity,” in which “illustrations and advertise-
ments from newspapers, magazines and books... are picked up, modified
in a virtuous manner, quoted, commented, and reassembled.” W hile these
appropriative practices seemed to be subversive at first glance, they did
not necessarily undermine the hegemony of the global mass media or
the operational logic of the news coverage. As we see, the African ap-
propriations did indeed have the potential to reverse the inherent value
judgments of the hegemonic news media they copied from. However, the
calendars’ logic of “pictorial journalism,” which was based on catch images
and symbolic representation through faces, was no different from that of
the dominant mass media.^3
Appealing to people’s curiosity about and desire for the sensational,
the first bin Laden posters, which appeared in print as early as September
2001, did not yet address any specific target group in terms of ethnicity or
rel ig ion. Ca lenda r publ ishers i n L agos told me t hat t h is nonspec i fic ta rget-
ing aimed to reach as broad a market as possible. However, as soon as the
publishers realized that there was a huge market for posters in the north-
ern part of the country that focused exclusively on Osama bin Laden, they
began to develop new motifs. Text elements that had initially been pre-
sented only in English were now supplemented by captions in Hausa. Af-
ter the Afghanistan war broke out, more and more posters became exclu-
sively dedicated to the mystery-shrouded character of Osama bin Laden.
As noted, poster publishers I talked to in Lagos in 2003 referred to their
work as “pictorial journalism.” A close look at the manner in which the
source material taken from global mass media has been rearranged and
supplemented by locally produced texts and pictures reveals that some of
the “selectors” (or attractors) are at work, which Niklas Luhmann (1996:
53–74) identifies as typical for the construction of reality in a newscast.
Most notably, this is the predilection for conflicts and transgression of
norms, and the attribution of such occurrences to individual actors. The
posters reduce complex world affairs to the agonistic moment of “America
versus Islam,” which is boiled down further to the confrontation between
Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. Hence, the two antagonists be-
came emblematic figures, or icons, of two opposing ideologies.