The Nigerian email scam novel

ABSTRACT

Looking to two third-generation Nigerian novels, Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009), this article examines representations of the “Nigerian email scam”. Following the narrator of Cole’s Thief, it reads these recent texts in the context of a longer, transdisciplinary encounter with the “informal economy”, a concept that took shape in development economics in the early 1970s to categorize the forms of work that sustain African “surplus populations”. After decades of neo-liberal development policy, however, informality has gained much wider traction, becoming, as Michael Denning writes, “the master trope for representing wageless life”. The email scam, it argues, offers these writers one rather sensational perspective from which to survey the dramatic reconfigurations of African labour in the past 40 years and confront the limits of postcolonial realism in an increasingly informalized 21st-century Nigerian economy.

KEYWORDS:

• 419
• email scams
• Nigerian literature
• informal economy
• Teju Cole
• Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For examples of recent short fiction see Gappah (2009) and Yang and Kim (2009). As Smith (2017) describes, 419 also plays an important thematic role in Nigerian cinema: “If one peruses the titles and contents of the thousands of videos produced by Nigeria’s popular Nollywood film industry, literally hundreds of films each year have the intersection of 419, politics, and intimacy as central plot lines” (160). See also the popular satirical song, “I Go Chop your Dollar” by Nkem Owoh (2005).

2. In an analysis of 56 scam emails collected between April and June 2005, Blommaert and Omoniyi (2006) find that only about 20 percent of the scam texts claim to originate from Nigeria, with similar figures for the UK, South Africa and the Netherlands (584). Kperogi (2018), however, also finds that, whatever their purported points of origin, 419 texts share remarkable commonalities grounded in “the expressive, lexical, and grammatical repertoire of Nigerian English, [which] unwittingly contributes to the pathologization and criminalization of the ‘English world’s fastest-growing non-native variety’” (224).

3. Pointing to a conceptual haziness at the boundary between the formal and informal sectors, Mbembe (2000), for instance, adds that, more than merely a zone of subsistence, what he calls the “shadow economy” should also be understood to include the “lucrative monopolies, secret contracts, [and] private deals”, which sustain, in particular, multinational extraction industries working in Africa (85–86).

4. As Ash Amin (2015) has recently described, “[e]ven in the most makeshift neighborhoods – generally treated as spaces of pure human endeavor in the prolific literature on slums – new and old technologies are central to social and cultural life” (248).

5. For discussions of the literary and rhetorical dimensions of 419 letters, see Glickman (2005), Blommaert and Omoniyi (2006), Smith (2007) and Cesare (2013).

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Notes on contributors

Peter Ribic

Peter Ribic is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation examines the relationship between the narrative form of the Anglophone postcolonial novel and the global Cold War project of “international development”. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Doris Lessing Studies.