Post-Colonial Politics
I am almost tempted to post this photo and say nothing else. Apparently acknowledging that you are black is the first step to recovery, the second is to show off your “hip-hop dance moves”. Well, at least it’s a step up from Carl Rove’s performance. Conservatives are reading this “coming out” as an indication of Powell’s imminent endorsement of Obama for president, and of course, yet another sign of the coming apocalypse.
The hidden story, however, is Powell’s complex endorsement of Nigerian 419 scams:
But it doesn’t look as if the former US secretary of state paid too much attention to the lyrics, or he might have discovered that the Nigerian hit is a celebration of that country’s most infamous export, advance-fee email fraud (sometimes called 419 fraud, after the relevant section of the Nigerian penal code). The perpetrators are known as “Yahoo boys” after their email service-provider of choice.
Maintain has claimed his song is social commentary rather than endorsement of a practice that has tarnished his country’s international reputation, but it’s hard to find the critical note in his name-checking of Hummers, dollars, and “Champagne, Hennessy, Moët” as the accessories of a successful fraudster’s lifestyle. As many Nigerians as foreigners have lost their savings to fraud, so how have chancers who sit up late typing random emails requesting peoples’ bank details in the name of “Mrs Maryam Abacha” become anti-heroes?
Partly, says Dan Smith of Brown University, author of a recent book on the subject, it’s the Robin Hood factor. “419 is a reversal of the hierarchies, showing that youths can be as sophisticated and cunning as their former colonial masters.”
So what we actually see here is Powell getting in touch with his inner Jamaican and engaging in a little colonial mimicry. Or is it the other way around and the whole time that we thought he was toeing the line of the Bush Doctrine he was actually mocking Rumsfeld with a healthy dose of counterinsurgent hybridity? This, my friends, is an astounding example of the subversion of imperial authority through the strategic deployment of transcultural liminality masquerading as syncretic nationalism.
It almost makes me feel good about the Iraq invasion, from a theoretical standpoint, of course.
