210 african appropriations
the dead expatriates referred to in the next-of-kin format worked in the
gold trade or oil business, a fact that appears sufficient to explain why
they would leave millions of dollars in personal bank accounts. As Daniel
Jordan Smith (2007: 47) points out, this is an illustration of “the widely
held Nigerian assumption that expatriates in Nigeria who work in the oil
industry are getting fabulously rich.” At the same time, the high salaries
paid to European engineers who work on construction jobs in Africa are
well known to the average European. To a certain extent, such workers
may indeed be seen as modern-day descendants of colonial adventurers.
The exploitation of Africa has a long tradition and by signposting that
the money referred to in the money-transfer scams derives either from
work in a resource industry or from shady deals, which come very close to
overt theft, scammers allude to the global order of things, in which Africa
remains a source of enrichment for others.
Scammers are obviously acquainted with the important function ac-
corded the mass media in Western systems of knowledge production. In
an attempt to invest their own stories with the level of truth their Western
marks associate with serious media coverage, many scam emails refer di-
rectly to such coverage. “You must have heard over the media reports and
the internet on the recovery of various huge sums of money deposited by
my husband in different security firms abroad,” states the widow Mariam
Abacha in her email quoted earlier. It was posted in 2003, following inter-
national media reports that detailed attempts by the Nigerian government
to recover the money deposited by the late military dictator Sani Abacha
in British and Swiss bank accounts. In an attempt to link their own texts
even more closely to “official” media texts, some scam emails contain hy-
perlinks to the web pages of the New York Times, BBC News, and similar
organizations. Serving as backdrops for new 419 email legends are events
such as the airplane crash in “Mahale National Park, in Tanzania on 13
December, 2005,” which left “Mr. Allan Williams” dead together “with
his wife who happened to be his only family” (September 22, 2009), or
the arrest of Charles Taylor, “who was the former president of Liberia,
now facing trial at the Hague in Europe” (March 18, 2010).^3 Given the ef-
ficiency of this strategy, which plays on the intertextual properties of the
internet’s hypertext medium, it comes as no surprise that in recent years,
scammers have broadened considerably the geographical scope of their