224 african appropriations
this momentum more than a decade ago when he stated that “informal
and illicit trade, financial fraud, the systematic evasion of rules and inter-
national agreements could turn out to be means, among others, by which
certain Africans manage to survive and to stake their place in the mael-
strom of globalization.” In fact, the scammers’ vindication of their illicit
craft as “retribution” carries yet another punch line. For as Andrew Smith
(2009) points out, the ongoing history of Western capitalist and imperial-
ist expansion is part of the condition for the success of Nigerian scams,
a dialectical irony already identified by Karl Marx. “There is in human
history something like retribution,” wrote Marx, in reference to the 1857
rebellion in India, “and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instru-
ment be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself ” (quoted
in A. Smith 2009: 29). This not only holds true for the media technology
the scammers employ (a material instrument forged by the offender), but
also for the orientalist representations of Africa (an ideological instru-
ment forged by the offender) which the scammers mimic in their scam
letters to induce credibility. In this case, the copy not only “draws on
the character and power of the original, to the point whereby it assumes
that character and that power” (Taussig 1993: xiii) but turns against the
“producers” of the original or their proxies—that is, the beneficiaries of
the ongoing history of Western capitalist and imperialist expansion. It is
significant, perhaps, that the successful scammer is called “master.” This
term can refer not only to the mastery of something but also to owner-
ship and power over people. In a postcolonial setting such as Nigeria, the
connotations that inevitably come to mind here are the “colonial master,”
the “slave master,” and the “master of servants.” To a certain extent then,
scamming turns former masters, or at least the proxies of former masters,
into mug us—into a categor y of people foolish enough to be “ow ned ” and
exploited, just as slaves and colonial subjects were, and postcolonial sub-
jects continue to be. The attribution of exploiting and being exploited, of
agency and “patienthood” (Gell 1998) is thus reversed: masters turn into
mugus and mugus into masters.
In the course of my online interviews, I experienced something of this
reversal of power relations myself. In the spirit of foolhardy honesty, I re-
vealed my true identity in the interview requests I dispatched by email and
provided a link to my website by way of authentication. I also believed that