254 african appropriations
overflowing with his pleas for votes. W hile he called upon his German
Facebook fans to vote for him to “show how big the Nam flava family
is” ( January 25, 2014), he appealed to his Namibian Twitter followers by
linking his personal project to national sentiments: “1 hour left before
the start of the big online tv show Millionärswahl—ar e you r eady to
vote for namibia???” This was his appeal to followers on Facebook a few
days before the show: “Watch the show live from any where in the world at
w w w.connect.prosieben.de and vote for namibia—and EES to bring
it home” ( January 22, 2014)!^25
For their friends and followers, the musician’s Facebook pages medi-
ate cosmopolitan awareness and provide a space for realizing their own
worldly engagements and tentative performances of cosmopolitanism.
By reading the postings of their co-subscribers and looking at their faces
that bespeak of different origins, they experience epidermal, cultural, and
linguistic difference. Mzungu Kichaa’s page contains messages in Swa-
hili, Danish, and English. English, German, Nam-släng, and Afrikaans
converge on EES’s page, whereas English, Nigerian pidgin English, and
Hausa converge on W hite Nigerian’s page. Visitors and subscribers are
able to witness the frequent travels of their “stars” by reading their updates
and looking at the uploaded snapshots. For some of the subscribers, these
pages are like windows onto a world of difference hitherto unknown to
them. One of EES’s German fans, Desiree Reiter, posted this message on
his Facebook page: “i hope sometime my dream come true and then it’s
like your life... in afrika with a bus and learn the spirit of other people”
(the “bus” refers to EES’s Volkswagen bus, baptized “Shaggon Waggon”).
Sometimes, fans perform their own tentative border crossings by posting
messages in one of the languages or linguistic codes used on a particular
page, which is not their own. On EES’s page, some black Namibians leave
short messages in German, and some of his German fans try Nam-släng.
W hile this is done in a playful mood, there is also a remarkable number of
Scandinavians posting well-formulated messages in Swahili on Mzungu
Kichaa’s page. On closer inspection, this turns out to be by people involved
in East African–related development work. On all three pages, messages
by subscribers and visitors almost always address the page owner and only
very rarely other subscribers and their postings. Of course, individual
subscribers may easily contact one another via their own Facebook pages,