20 african appropriations
much my own conviction. In this book, I focus on the appropriation by
African cultural producers of alien cultural objects, such as performances,
music, texts, still images, and films. W hile most of the appropriated objects
I look at originate outside of Africa, some have African sources. In particu-
lar, I am interested in appropriations that display a certain deliberate play
with difference and strive for a symbolic “borrowing of power,” from that
which has been appropriated. To highlight this aspect of appropriation,
I rely on the term mimesis, as this implies some sort of relationship to an
“original” (understood here simply as that to which a “copy” relates) and
the borrowing of some of its qualities. The embodiment of spirits clad in
European uniforms in Hausa rituals in Nigeria (chapter 1), Titanic songs
sung by Tanzanian choirs (chapter 3), and the mimicry of bureaucracy by
Nigerian cyber scammers (chapter 7) are all aimed at invoking contact—
in quite a number of ways—with their originals by means of the fabricated
copies, as is apparent throughout this book.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOKMost of the appropriations I discuss herein are related to the two Af-
rican countries where I spent most of my time as a researcher—that is,
Nigeria and Tanzania. To a minor extent, reference is made to Congo,
Ghana, Namibia, Niger, and South Africa as well. Each chapter addresses
the case of a different copy, thus covering a wide range of examples in
terms of media—from mimetic interpretations of the European other by
African spirit mediums during the early decades of the twentieth century
to the pastiches of blackness in music video clips produced by cosmo-
politan “crazy white men” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In
each chapter I focus on the copy as text, the context that was conducive
to its production, and the media involved, along with its social effects. The
degree to which I discuss each of these parameters, however, varies from
chapter to chapter.
Chapter 1 focuses on what I have called an “ur-scene” of the media-
tion of cultural difference in Africa. I recollect my own experiences in
northern Nigeria during the first half of the 1990s with spirit mediums
possessed by Komanda Mugu—the Wicked Major—and other spirits