192 african appropriations
There are various reasons the logic of politicsploitation was success-
ful with poster and sticker production but not in the marketing of video
movies. In Nigeria, video movies sell through cassette/cd covers, poster
promotion, and word-of-mouth advertising. Neither the southern bin
Laden video nor its northern counterpart lived up to the promise of its
cover, because in both movies the bin Laden character appears only in a
few sequences. Moreover, both movies have very low production values,
even by local standards. In northern Nigeria, matters were made worse
by the fact that the comedic treatment of the subject, and in particular
the portrayal of bin Laden as a buffoon, was considered sacrilegious. The
whole fuss preceding the movie’s release had doubtlessly aroused a great
deal of interest, and when it eventually came out, it sold well in the first
week; however, sales soon nosedived when word got around that Ibro in
the role of bin Laden was by no means at his best.
The reversal of the dominant Western perspective on international
political events is most aptly realized in Ibro Saddam. Even though the
movie built on a consensus apparently existing among some factions of
the northern Nigerian populace, it was a box-office failure, and no sequel
was made, and this was the case with the two other comedies as well.
On the one hand, the movie was released too late; when it came out in
September 2003, it had already been overtaken by reality—Iraq had been
defeated, and Saddam Hussein, who went into hiding, was no longer suit-
able as a hero. On the other, Nigerian Muslims were reluctant to accept
Hussein as an icon of Islamic religiosity because his public image—unlike
that of bin Laden—was missing most of the typical markers of a devout
Muslim.
ENCODING/DECODING BIN LADENThe Nigerian signification of bin Laden between 2001 and 2003 in-
volved four different “actors”: bin Laden himself, or rather al-Qaeda’s
media production house, As-Sahab; cnn & Co., who disseminated bin
Laden’s iconic self-stagings; Nigerian media producers, who reassembled
these images and spiced them up to cater to certain audiences; and last
but not least, the local consumer, who decoded the images encoded by the