"Play on sterotypical understandings of Africa" - Anthropologist analyses Nigerian scam emails

Email scams constitute the third largest industry in Nigeria, after oil and drugs. These email-scammers succeed because they play on stereotypical understandings of Africa, anthropologist Elina Hartikainen concludes in paper, that she presented at a conference few weeks ago.

Most of us have received emails from African chiefs and businessmen, or relatives of them, with pleas for assistance in retrieving large sums of money that for some reason is inaccessible for them. As compensation we are promised a sizeable percentage of it. In 2001 alone, “Nigerian scammers” have earned around 500 million dollar from victims all over the world.

The spam filters at Hartikainens university are not that good, so she received lots of these scam-emails and started collecting them. There is no thing on earth that cannot be of interest for an anthropologist! When she finally read through one of the emails, she was totally fascinated by the ways in which it played on stereotypical understandings of Africa.

She writes:

The power of these e-mails to engage their recipients in further interaction is centrally founded on the senders’ artful calibration of both the content and form of the e-mails to Western stereotypes of Africa and African cultural practices. It is by representing themselves as embedded in webs of corruption, oil wealth, religious piety and traditional inheritance customs that the senders of the requests for assistance construct themselves as imaginable characters to their Western audience.

She provides this example. “Mrs.Princess Mawa” writes to her, telling about the death of her father, a wealthy businessman:

Following his death, his family members insisted that I am not entitled to his property (Assets and money) since I am a woman and my offspring is all girl as I do not have a male child for my late husband claiming that it is what our tradition entails. Well, because of this barbaric traditional law here in COTE D’IVOIRE which doesn’t permit a woman to inherit her Husbands property incase of death if she has no male child, the relatives of my late Husband are expected by tradition to take over the management of his business and other properties including myself who automatically becomes a wife to one of his immediate brothers.

Hartikainen comments:

This description of Princess Mawa’s situation in terms of traditional, barbaric kin and inheritance customs plays a dual role in enticing the recipient of the request into responding to it. On the one hand it serves to reinforce stereotypical understandings of African tradition that circulate in the popular media. (...) On the other hand, Princess Mawa’s condemnation of her own society’s “barbaric traditions” and particularly her claim to invest her share of her money in her daughter’s education (...) create the possibility for the recipient of the letter to claim that in the final run their decision to cooperate in the scheme is not motivated by financial profits alone, but it is also morally justified.

One can expect that no one takes these mails seriously. But those who do, respond on the basis of impressions of the senders’ intellectual inferiority, Hartikainen supposes. Many of the victims, she writes, consider themselves to be scamming the scammers only to realize that it was not they who were playing the scammer for the fool, but the opposite.

>> read her entry: Writing on Nigerian Scams

The paper is not yet available online. But she has an interesting blog called becoming an anthropologist - about me and my life somewhere between bahia, chicago and helsinki where she will publish the paper when she has "cleaned up the paper", since it is "still in more of a presentation format".