introduction 25addressees. Within the ethno-religious politics of the Nigerian nation-
state, images of bin Laden connected the Muslim north with a radical
Islamic force from outside. I see this as an attempt to tap the potential
of a powerful other to increase Muslim agency and northern Nigerian
bargaining clout at a time when the country was headed by a Christian
president. Within the Muslim north, which underwent a massive Islamic
revival at the time, images of bin Laden were meant to remind local elites
of their duty to share their wealth with their less-affluent brothers in faith,
just as bin Laden was alleged to have done. Given the millenarian hopes
t hat were a ssoc iated w it h t he rei nt roduc t ion of sha r ia law, t he t y pe of copy
and contact at play here is, in a way, reminiscent of that employed by the
spirit mediums I describe in chapter 1. Both seek to contact a power from
outside through locally produced copies of that power, to gain agency in
local projects of radical social reform.
Copies of newscasts and other genres of dominant global mass media
are also key to the strategies of African cyber scammers, which I discuss
in chapter 7. To lull their victims, the majority of whom are from America
or Europe, Nigerian advance fee fraudsters mimic the common forms of
Western representations of Africa. And sure enough, the stories made up
by scammers in these unsolicited emails tie in very well with Western
stereotypes of Africa, and are deliberately meant to do so. As the scam
goes, some ex-dictator or corrupt government official offers to pay for the
privilege of moving millions of dollars out of his countr y, in exchange for
a bank account number. The copy has to be as faithful to its original as
possible if the scammers are to succeed. Indeed, this is a special case of
contact and copy, in which the copy is not only used to evoke its original
but actually turns against those who are associated with the original’s
production—a perfect example of mimicry as a form of “mischievous
imitation” (Huggan 1997/1998: 94). Along the lines of such scams, more
forged copies are important as well, such as copies of bureaucratic paper-
work and international business procedures. As I learned through online
interviews, scammers justify their crimes as “retribution” for Africa’s co-
lonial and postcolonial exploitation by Europe and America. Scamming
turns former “masters” into mugus, or “fools,” as the victims are called in
Nigerian scammer parlance. If the so-called savage ever hit back with a
form of imitation, it is precisely through this orientalist mimicry and not