African Appropriations: cultural difference, mimesis, and media by Matthias Krings (review)

What do Nigerian spirit mediums, South African photo novels, African remakes of the film Titanic, emerging video film industries, Nigerian Bin Laden imagery, cyber fraudsters and 'crazy white' African popular musicians have in common?

They all, as Matthias Krings shows, appropriate foreignness through a process of mimicry and in this way mediate cultural difference. African artists do this with very different media (bodies, images, novels, film or email) and appropriate for very different needs and ends. In looking at their foreign sources and their remakes or adaptations, Krings' drawing on Plato's and Aristotle's conception of mimesis and mimicry calls into question the categories of original and copy.

The eight studies presented in the book present Krings' anthropological work in Nigeria and Tanzania in the field of media and popular culture over the last twenty-five years. The chronological arrangement of the studies gives the readers insights into the histories of African cultural appropriations over a vast array of media forms, actors and imageries.

The journey starts in Nigeria with the example of the Wicked Major Komanda Mugu, one of the Babule spirits whose mediums are possessed by spirits of European descent. Tracing the origin of the spirit's cults in Niger in the 1920s, their reappearances in Ghana in the 1950s and their presence in Bori cults in Nigeria in the 1990s, Krings' accounts reveal the histories and travels of the spirit mediums as well as their colonial and scientific interpretations. These kind of appropriations, as Krings argues, should be read as embodied pastiches, 'as particular spiritualised copies of powerful others' rather than as mere forms of ridiculization of their European masters. In a self-reflexive and self-ironic nod to his own role as a young German anthropologist participating in Bori spirit sessions in the 1990s, he shows that anthropologists going native part time is just the reverse of this appropriation practice.

The accounts of the spirit mediums link perfectly to a later chapter, in which the author shows how, a century later, Nigerian businessmen turn the colonial relationship between European masters and African subjects around. By mimicking Western news and imaginations of Africa, Nigerian cyber fraudsters trap their victims and make stupid 'mugus' of former masters, who finally have to pay for the depth of colonial suffering.

In another example in the book, this colonial and postcolonial relationship is creatively undone by 'white' popular musicians in Tanzania, Nigeria and Namibia. While they embody difference, namely being 'white', they relate to sameness as they perfectly adopt local style and language in their musical performances. The big success of these musicians in Africa shows how, in their claim to sameness and national belonging, questions of colonial history are rendered meaningless for their audiences.

Discussing the example of the South African photo novel starring the African crime buster Lance Spearman and its almost pan-African reception in the 1960s, Krings shows how the readers of these novels shared a common African modernity and how the photo novels, through their visual aesthetics, functioned as a surrogate and model for the later emergence of African cinemas.

African appropriations of Western pop cultural products are best exemplified by the film Titanic from 1997, which gained extraordinary popularity in Africa. With four examples of its African appropriations – a Hausa video film remake, a Tanzanian comic book and gospel album and a Congolese music video clip – the author illustrates how African artists creatively appropriated the film through different styles and aesthetics and to different ends. The photo novels as well as the remakes of Titanic, according to the author, can be interpreted as preappropriations of the medium of film before African artists turned to film production, as in Northern Nigeria and Tanzania. Both case studies make clear how, in appropriating Bollywood and Nollywood, filmmakers create their own representations of modernity, and, in the case of Northern Nigeria, thus come into conflict with and...