I was already semi-familar with the “Nigerian scam” from all the spam I get about sending money so they will send you money and so forth… A tell-tale sign you are getting scam mail is the misspelled words and bad grammar that a legit business would try to avoid. However primitive this may seem to me, I’ve read about Hollywood dummies who are already wealthy, falling for this scam. Greed follows greed. I found that Nicaragua had an “alternative free market” that seems similar to what is described about Nigeria in Larkin. Westerners look upon these structures with a different frame of reference, having never lived in a place so debilitated by poverty, political upheaval and latent Imperialism; it is hard for us to see this underground financial system as a valid enterprise. Ironically, things like what Larkin describes happen within our own urban ghettos, where poverty and crime mix to establish a counter culture within a country of capitalistic excess. So Nigeria is not so far away from our society, it is simply less “evolved” than ours.
Degraded Images…
Advertisement
