Under the strange title of African Appropriations, this book revealed itself to be an effective means to travel through the field of media in contemporary Africa. Not so much because a large spectrum of media is placed under scrutiny, but because the study is based on first-hand ethnographic data collected by the author during lengthy fieldwork in Africa (mainly Nigeria and Tanzania) and a thorough knowledge of the scientific literature in this field.

The work is made up of eight chapters – or short essays – which can be read in no particular order as long as the reader takes the time to get acquainted with the conceptual tools this cultural anthropologist has used to understand how local African societies are dealing with the visual products of all kinds (movies, soap operas, comics, video-clips) which reach them through old (photography, printed material) and new (television, video, Internet) media. Among the components of his theoretical background are the common notion of cultural appropriation, understood as the various ways a cultural product may be adapted to suit new contexts, the more original one of mimesis – borrowed from Ancient Greek philosophers – that has been implemented to think about the complex relationship between the Same and the Other.

The first and the last chapters have in common the fact that human beings are the primary medium of communication. In Chapter One, Matthias Krings describes and analyzes a spirit possession ritual still performed in northern Nigeria at the end of the twentieth century that was aimed at capturing the power hidden behind European forces in order to solve problems associated with what he calls modernity. It should be noted that the repeated use of this term, or the related phrase ‘local modernities’, without ever defining it constitutes a significant conceptual weakness in this otherwise remarkable work. In the last chapter, entitled ‘Crazy White Men’, the author completes the circle by tackling the issue of the relationship between the Same and the Other through the portraits of three white-skinned artists playing African music and trying to capitalize on their skin color to stand out in the mediascape. But in this case, if the human body is still the first medium of communication as it was in the possession ritual, the technological means used to represent and disseminate its image and its voice are changing it into a commodity ready for consumption in the context of a global market economy.

The six other chapters describe successively how cultural appropriation might be put into practice depending on the goals of the social actors, on the media being used, and on the social and cultural context. From an ethno-historical point of view, I was very interested by the second chapter, in which the author shows how South African photo-novels have paved the way to more easily accessible (because they bypass written language) media technologies such as movies, television, video, and the Internet. It should be mentioned that, paradoxically, in order to study this pre-Internet phenomena, the author had to make use of media stemming from the digital revolution (Internet, blogs, and Facebook) to collect what should be called e-ethnographic data. He applied the same investigative technique to realize a study of the cybercrime scene in Nigeria, the results of which are reported in the seventh chapter entitled ‘Master and Mugu: Orientalist Mimicry and Cybercrime’. In this delightful piece of ‘Arroseur arrosé’ (sprayed sprinkler), the author shows how smart cyber criminals are turning mimesis into mimicry – fraudulent emails built on stereotypical Western images of Africans – to hook their European and North American prey.

But the core of this book (Chapters Three through Six) is dedicated to the central role video technology is playing in the creation and dissemination, at least in English-speaking countries, of an original African visual culture. This phenomenon is propelled forward by the industrial-scale production of films in Nigeria – Nollywood – as it is shown within the various remediations (a film, a graphic novel, and a religious choir's song) of the Titanic tale; the development of a local Tanzanian production of films; and, the ‘branding’ of Osama bin Laden as a Muslim hero in the troubled political Nigerian context. But the development of this video-based visual culture is not without obstacles, as the author shows in Chapter Four, where he makes reference to an auto-da-fé of video tapes that occurred in northern Nigeria after the reintroduction of Sharia law in 2001, an event that leaves open the question of whether an old-style censorship of this kind is still efficient in the age of Internet.