Master and Mugu 209Hence, a number of emails depict Africa as a place where strange cus-
toms abound; for example, this is an email I received from Saratu Ouattara
in Burkina Faso:
Dearest one
I am writing to seek your partnership in the investment of my inherited
fund (usd$17.5M) from my late father who died mysteriously last year.
It was very evident that he was poisoned to death. In my culture, when a
man dies without a mail [sic] child, the brothers share his property leaving
both the wife and the daughters empty, they took [everything] includ-
ing the house we lived in. This is the exact case with me as I am the only
daughter of my father. I lost my mother when I was barely a year old and
my father refused to re-marry another wife because he felt solely respon-
sible for my mother’s death. (February 2, 2010)The writer, who pretends to be a woman, obviously mimics the Western
discourse of gender equality while tugging at the heartstrings of potential
victims by relating a touching story about misery and orphanhood. As
Andrew Smith (2009: 35) notes, scammers sometimes deliberately “speak
with the voice of the figure who mediates between an unfamiliar local
reality and a Western reader, and who gives their reader knowledge that
is tacitly empowering.” This observation helps to link Smith’s initial inter-
pretation of 419 emails as mimicry of Western representations of Africa to
that of his namesake Daniel Jordan Smith (2007), who reads such emails
as popular cultural texts containing local interpretations of corruption
in Nigeria and beyond. I suggest both readings are valid. Scam letters
contain local interpretations of African social reality and the mimicry of
Western representations of African reality precisely because they need to
connect two systems of knowledge—that of those penning the letters and
that of the recipients. Scammers are mediators between two different life-
worlds and their dominant imaginaries. Letters that consciously mediate
between the two must surely have the greatest chance of success; hence,
they carry imprints of both.
A tradition that both the West and Africa have come to share is the
exploitation of this resource-rich continent to the advantage of the Global
North and disadvantage of ordinary Africans down through the history
of Euro-African bilateral relations. It is no coincidence that so many of