174 african appropriations
merchandise had already dwindled. To overcome my limited data on
consumers, I resorted to reading cultural products—that is, bin Laden
merchandise—against the historical context of their production and con-
sumption, relying both on academic and journalistic sources and my own
acquaintance with Nigeria built over the course of several research stays
between 1991 and 2003. Since I did not observe actual consumers of bin
Laden merchandise in their “natural” consumption settings, I am unable
to differentiate the consumers in terms of their identification with any of
the numerous denominations of Islamic belief in Nigeria. In other words,
though I am fully aware that Muslims in northern Nigeria are heteroge-
neous internally (with Sufi brotherhoods on the one hand and on the other
various factions of more or less radical orthodox groups, ranging from
Abubakar Gumi’s Izala, to more recent currents of radical Islam), I pos-
sess a rather incomplete vocabulary with which to speak about those who
bought bin Laden posters and stickers in 2001 and 2002. All I know is that
they were Muslims from the north. Hence, I set myself the humble task
of trying to understand why bin Laden merchandise was bought and sug-
gesting some plausible meanings bin Laden took on in post-9/11 Nigeria.
RELIGIOUS REVERSION AND THE UTOPIA OF JUST RULEAt the time of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the campaign
for a reintroduction of sharia criminal law in northern Nigeria had just
reached its climax. This campaign, which had originally been initiated
by Ahmed Sani, a local politician in Zamfara state, as an electoral prom-
ise in the run-up to the gubernatorial elections of 1999, developed into a
veritable grass-roots movement in the following years. As a result, by 2001,
twelve states in the federal republic had reformed, or were in the process
of reforming, their legislatures. Already in mid-2000, Murray Last (2000)
observed a millenarian atmosphere in northern Nigerian towns preparing
for sharia. The common people hoped that the divine law would put an end
to all evil and bring about social justice and a fundamental improvement
in their living conditions, which had dramatically changed for the worse
at the close of the twentieth century. General mismanagement, corrup-