262 african appropriations
mimesis is frequently considered dangerous for those who undertake it.
The belief that imitators are affected by the imitated is already present in
Plato’s Republic. It ca n be t raced t h roug hout Eu ropea n t heater h istor y a nd
is also present in African performance traditions involving possession-
trance (chapter 1). Similar convictions also exist in Nigerian and Tanza-
nian video filmmaking where actors and actresses are often associated
with the types they play. In northern Nigeria, for example, critics have
equated actors with the immoral behavior of the characters depicted in
Hausa videos. In her study of Pentecostal television drama production
in Kinshasa, Katrien Pype (2012) explains how the producers take pre-
cautions through praying and other preemptive measures to prevent the
devil from conquering the souls of the actors who are imitating wicked
characters. The underlying logic is that of sympathetic magic in which like
produces like and “imitating is copying and becoming” (140). Imitating
immoral behavior is almost like inviting the devil to come and take a seat
within the imitator’s soul. Such ideas about the dangers of mimesis have
been observed among southern Nigerian and Ghanaian video filmmakers
as well (Meyer 2006).
However, mimesis may be considered potentially dangerous both for
those who engage in it and for the audiences who are deemed likely to
imitate what they read in books or see in plays, films, or video games. This
conviction, again already mentioned by Plato, informs much of the critical
debate about the imagined negative effects of media on youth—not only
in African societies. We may wonder whether it is due to the physiology of
sensing—“seeing something or hearing something is to be in contact with
that something” (Taussig 1993: 21)—that mimesis is believed to also be
contagious to its audiences. In the preceding chapters, we first come across
a variant of this type of discourse in the contemporary Kenyan critique of
the Lance Spearman photo novels, which were targeted for their “violence
and gangster dialogue” and were believed to have caused an increase in
crime in East African cities during the 1960s. Most prominently, how-
ever, we see it at work in the controversies surrounding vice and videos
in northern Nigeria. Because of their imitations of “other possible lives”
(via their taking models from Indian popular cinema), Hausa videos were
considered harmful to their audiences. Parents and elders feared that the
films would “destroy the moral upbringing” of their children whom they