E-fraud economy as an emergent perspective towards the corpus of African hustler narratives

The different categories of African hustler narratives represent particular ways of addressing the shortcomings of the African postcolonial economy from the perspective of the ultimately self-defeating responses of individual characters. This article examines the narrative significance of e-fraud literature as a subset of African hustler narratives. As an e-fraud novel, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance follows the lives of e-scammers for whom e-fraud practice is an alternative to the exclusionary Nigerian postcolonial economy. However, in embracing e-fraud as an alternative to their economic exclusion, e-fraudsters in Nwaubani’s novel appropriate a deceptive digital geography that is in dialogue with the same exploitative and extractive Nigerian postcolonial economic landscape which they seek to circumvent. In this way, the novel articulates the extent to which the performance of e-fraud economy as a hustle economy intersects with the arbitrariness and decline of Nigerian postcolonial economy.