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Overview
In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer Charles Piot follows Kodjo Nicolas Batema, a Togolese visa broker-known as a "fixer"-as he shepherds his clients through the application and interview process. Relaying the experiences of the fixer, his clients, and embassy officials, Piot captures the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between the embassy and the hopeful Togolese as well as the disappointments and successes of lottery winners in the United States. These detailed and compelling stories uniquely illustrate the desire and savviness of migrants as they work to find what they hope will be a better life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478003045 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2019 |
| Series: | Theory in Forms |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 736,596 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.51(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Border Practice
In addition to inaugurating a time of political and economic uncertainty and turbulence — a time of scrambled hopes, unsettled sovereignty, increasing privation — the decades after the Cold War (1990 – 2010) in West Africa produced proliferating cultures of duplicity and identity fraud (Apter 1999, 2005; Hibou 1999; Smith 2007). Nigerian 419 — the now (in) famous system of internet fraud whereby an overseas client is duped by the promise of sharing vast oil (or other) profits in return for sheltering money in a personal bank account, a transaction that demands that the client pay processing fees and transfer an account number which, needless to say, is quickly emptied (Apter 1999, 2005; Smith 2001, 2007) — is but one example of the sort of confidence trick that has become ever more common in the current conjuncture. The Cameroonian feyman (Malaquais 2001a, 2001b; Nyamnjoh 2006; Ndjio 2006, 2008), a con artist peddling counterfeit money and shady business deals, is another. But focusing on these more spectacular examples of dissimulation and identity manipulation obscures the pervasive, quotidian nature of similar practices throughout the subregion (Smith 2007).
In Togo today, counterfeits and copies are so common in the stores and on the streets of Lomé, a city in which the hustle economy is a way of life, that one can never be sure whether an object one has purchased is "real" or not: a real or a fake Nokia phone, a real or an imitation piece of designer clothing, a new or a used car part. When buying gasoline, you had better make sure the meter on the pump has been reset to zero. Otherwise the vendor will charge the full amount and skim the difference. When taking your car or motorcycle to a mechanic for servicing, you never know whether an oil change means new or old oil, whether new break shoes mean old ones at a "new" price, what other parts might have been traded out while the mechanic was working on your car or moto, whether a part removed this time will be sold back to you the next. Asking for a receipt, you imagine, might provide some sort of verification — until you realize that all receipts are easily falsified. "When I need work done on my car," a Togolese academic told me, "I never leave the vehicle unattended, even if it means waiting all day at the shop. And I always accompany the mechanic to the parts store, making sure to pay for everything myself."
In a nuanced analysis of Lomé's famous cloth market, Nina Sylvanus (2016) describes the bewildering array of "upstart brands, knockoffs, counterfeits, and copies" (22), and copies of copies of copies, that flood the market. There are imitations (many of them Chinese) of high-end Dutch Wax prints that are labelled "real Dutch," "genuine Dutch," and "Made In Holland" (144). Some are considered "authentic copies," valued because they conceal their true character when worn, whereas others are fake copies (those that do not). "The question of what is real," Sylvanus insists, "is not one we should be asking" (18). While inhabiting a world of "semiotic uncertainty" (144), consumers nevertheless adapt quickly to the new categories and learn to navigate their ambiguities.
Hoping to avoid the risks of purchasing a "Chinese" (pirated) phone on the street, I decided to get one at the Nokia store instead. When a friend heard this, she scoffed at my willingness to trust the brand, commenting simply that "you never know whether a Nokia is a Nokia or not." "Even at the Nokia store?" I asked. "Especially at that store," she shot back.
This same person purchased ten bags of cement for a masonry job at a boutique she owned, only to discover, when told by the mason that she needed to buy more, that he had appropriated four for himself. Another acquaintance, a carpenter I have known since childhood and someone otherwise honest to a fault, told me that he and his co-workers routinely plunder every worksite. "At the end of the day, we take materials home with us — a piece of lumber, some cement, maybe a tool. We get paid almost nothing, so this is how we make it worthwhile." At Togo's two universities, passing grades reflect monetary gifts (or sexual favors) to teachers as much as performance in the classroom, and medical treatment at Lomé's clinics and hospitals often depends on whether nurses and doctors have been "thanked" along the way. In an instance of skimming of a different stripe, the sons of a penniless man I know agreed to foot his medical bills but insisted that they accompany him to the pharmacy for fear that if he went alone he would skimp on the meds and pocket the money. "Imagine," one of the sons remarked, "that he would try to turn his sickness into a market, and, even worse, that he would seek profit from the money of his children."
One of these same sons helped his mother buy a female sheep from a man who lived in her neighborhood. They thought the offer a good deal because the ewe was pregnant and the man's asking price was only slightly above the cost of a single sheep. A week after the purchase, the animal died and, in cutting it open, they found its belly full of plastic bags — bags, they surmised, that the man had fed it to create an appearance that would inflate the price.
In a widely publicized moment in fall 2010, one that deserves a place on any "can-you-top-this" list, a soccer team claiming to be the Togolese national team played an international match in Bahrain, a match won by the host country 3 – 0. Authorities back home learned of the match when Bahrain complained that the Togolese team had not put up a strong effort and seemed winded by halftime. After an investigation, the chairman of Togo's soccer federation declared that the players were "completely fake. We have not sent any team of footballers to Bahrain. The players are not known to us." Upon further inquiry, it was discovered that a former coach saw an opportunity to profit from an oil-rich country eager to promote its soccer team (and willing to foot the bill for the match) and recruited players off the street, outfitting them with jerseys from the national team. Upon hearing of this episode, Kodjo commented wryly, "I think we have taken 419 [the art of the scam] to a new level — to one that even Nigerians and Ghanaians would be proud of."
But wait, there is recent breaking news from Ghana: A "fake" US embassy has been discovered by authorities in Accra — an "embassy" that has been issuing real US (and Schengen, Indian, and South African) visas for ten years. According to the published story, the sham embassy, a run-down two-story building with an American flag out front and a portrait of Barack Obama inside, was staffed by English-speaking Turkish citizens (presumably because they could "pass" as US consular officials more easily than Ghanaians). The embassy advertised its services in neighboring countries, including Togo, and put up non-nationals in nearby hotels. Their visas sold for $6,000 apiece. How they got away with it for so long, and how they had access to real visas, is still unknown. (This entanglement of fake-real, a Togolese acquaintance and former fraud officer at the embassy in Lomé pointed out, goes beyond an imposter embassy staging itself as real. It must also have involved traffic between the two "embassies," he insisted. "A Ghanaian working at the US Embassy cannot issue [steal] visas, only a consul can. This means the Americans were involved.")
Then, another bizarre twist to this strangest of stories: In late 2017, an article appeared in the Guardian claiming that the story of the fake embassy was a fake story, that no such embassy ever existed, and that the account had been manufactured by ... the American embassy (Yeebo 2017).
It is tempting to read this culture of duplicity, in both its spectacular and its mundane iterations, as a "culture of corruption," as Daniel Smith (2007) calls it in his prescient analysis of political corruption and everyday fraud in Nigeria — as moral failure, as violation of the principle of "trust" on which modern nation-states and bourgeois economies rely in order to function (Giddens 1990). After all, this view of Africans — as morally degraded, as uncivilized, as unfit for the modern world — is one to which Euro-Americans have long held. Is this not the latest proof that such continues to be the case? Or less judgmentally, we might see this culture of duplicity as the unsurprising consequence of inhabiting an island of privation amidst a more affluent global, a global that has passed Africa by. In such a telling, the confidence trick might be the only means available to separate self from starvation.
Perhaps true — at least the deprivationist, if not the racist, view — but these are bourgeois categories of analysis that rely on the very distinctions they aim to critique (between real/fake, authentic/inauthentic). They are not categories shared by my Togolese interlocutors, for whom distinctions between authentic and inauthentic (real and fake) are not meaningful, and for whom pragmatics — the search for livelihood in a world of limited means — trumps all. I will say more about this later.
It bears reiterating that Africa is far from exceptional. In their recent book, The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (2016), Jean and John Comaroff suggest that imposture and deception, a blurring of the lines between legal and illegal, and between criminal economy and legitimate business, have today become a generalized global condition, in the metropole as well as the Global South. The Comaroffs claim we live in a world of the imposter and con artist, a world in which the line between person-as-authentic and person-as-artifice, the "subject and its double," is vanishing (126), and in which "self-making-by-faking" is rampant (xvii) — Trump redux! — with identity comprising "copies all the way down" (see also Nakassis 2013). They attribute such blurring and cultures of dissimulation in general to transformations in global capitalism over the past twenty-five years, with its uneven liberalization, deregulation, and de-territorialization of the economy, keeping capital on the move in search of legally lax, relatively undocumented, untaxed shelters (31).
LOTO VISA
The "loto visa," as it is referred to in Lomé, shares affinities with Lomé everyday practices and their resonance throughout the larger subregion. It is an act of conjuring, an attempt to generate something of value (an identity, a proxy citizenship) out of nothing, or better, to profit from someone else's good fortune by turning one visa into two. When I first heard about the DV Lottery from Kodjo in the early 2000s, at a time when he had just married a female selectee in the hope of acquiring a visa for himself, I was struck by his ingenuity in attempting to game the system and by the inventions and sleights of hand of visa lottery culture more broadly. Kodjo and his fellow fixers — an honor-among-thieves confrèrie — are not only clever strategists, psychologists, and financiers but also adept at matching local desire to DV protocols. And they are masterful in perpetuating the fantasy and dream of an elsewhere and keeping hope alive, without which the lottery buzz all goes away. But the devil is in the details, to which I now turn.
Once someone has been selected in the May lottery, and before they go for the obligatory interview at the US Embassy in Lomé, they often attempt to add "dependents" to their dossier. Sometimes these are legitimate relatives but often not. (Indeed, they are typically a spouse or a family member of Togolese already in the diaspora, who can more easily afford the quid pro quo: payment of the visa winner's embassy interview fee and purchase of their plane ticket to the US.) Because US immigration rules only permit the visa winner to be accompanied by a spouse and children, the winner must then "marry" his sponsor's wife (or sister, or cousin) and "adopt" any children before the interview, then present proof that they are indeed the winner's dependents. This in turn requires producing a file of documents — marriage papers, wedding photos, birth certificates, high school diplomas, passports. One somewhat atypical but nevertheless revealing example of the gymnastics called into being by these arrangements: The wife of a friend of mine arrived in the US as the "wife" of the best friend of her brother (a "husband" she then divorced before marrying my friend). The previous year, the brother and his friend had both received political asylum and entered into a "sister-exchange" arrangement, whereby each would "marry" the other's sister and pay her way to the States. As part of the agreement, my friend's wife's "husband" spent over $2,500 returning to Togo to take wedding photos with his best friend's sister, which she then presented at the embassy as proof that she was married to him. Moreover, this "husband" could not fly to Lomé itself for fear that his asylum status might be jeopardized if US authorities discovered that he had been back in Togo. Instead he flew to Accra, took a bus to the border — where they only check passports of non – West Africans — and crossed into Togo on foot.
Another area of play/invention: A lottery winner must either possess a high school diploma (the French baccalaureate) or have two years of job expertise in a profession that is on the US Department of Labor job list. In the early 2000s, those without the baccalaureate who did not already fit the job profile were quickly "apprenticed" into the appropriate trades (and papers backdating the apprenticeship and subsequent work experience were manufactured). The US consular official who was conducting interviews of visa lottery winners in summer 2003 told me that as soon as tailoring was put on the list "everyone in Togo became a tailor!" And when "peintre en bâtiment" (house painter) made the list in 2006, the consul's office was flooded with applications of those claiming to be painters.
A cottage industry of visa lottery entrepreneurs has grown up around these practices — those who help others with the online visa registration, those who know whom to bribe to get false marriage or adoption or job papers, those who arrange the taking of marriage photos, and especially those like Kodjo who serve as brokers between those in the diaspora and those at home. Kodjo signed up over twelve hundred people for the lottery in fall 2005. He wrote me just after the new online registration season had opened in November to say that he was leaving for northern Togo to enlist what he hoped would be several hundred applicants. In the north ("an untouched territory," he called it), he visited local high schools, where he sought permission from the school principal to speak with those students in their last year, because most in "terminale" are single (more easily enabling dependents to be added to the winners' files) and because they sit for the baccalaureate in July (with success ensuring an easier passage through the embassy interview). An innovation here in repertoire: unlike other visa lottery brokers, Kodjo does not charge any of his enlistees to help them register; he takes their photo and fills out the online form for them, all free. In return he retains the right to "treat" their file. If they win, he will add "dependents" (and make money for doing so). He's quite level-headed about all of this, saying that he simply plays the odds — his own lottery within the visa lottery. "If only 1 percent of my applicants are selected, I can live for an entire year."
The embassy is of course fully aware that all of this gaming is going on and has developed a set of tests to attempt to detect real from sham winners and especially real from fake spouses. Thus a common embassy strategy is to interview spouses separately, asking about the habits and desires of the other: "What's your husband's favorite food?" "What did you eat yesterday?" "Who got up first this morning, you or your husband?" "What color underwear were you wearing?" "Does your baby sleep in a crib or in bed with you?" "As a law student, what area of the law is your husband pursuing?" The embassy also knows of course that as soon as they ask a particular question it will circulate to those who are next in line for interviews. (Indeed, Kodjo has a file of all the questions asked of interviewees over the past several years, which he shares with friends and clients who are prepping for the embassy interview.) Thus, a hide-and-seek game develops between embassy and street, with the embassy trying to stay one step ahead by springing new questions and those about to go for interviews making sure they know as soon as new questions appear. In 2006, an interviewee's doctor's report — it is mandatory to have a physical exam before the interview — noted that there was a scar on one of his legs. The consular official conducting the interview asked his "wife" which leg, and when she guessed incorrectly, they failed the interview. The next day, all on the street knew why they had failed and had begun to explore the intimacies of their visa-spouses' bodies. During an applicant's embassy interview in January 2006, the consul challenged the woman she was interviewing by telling her that she didn't believe the man who had accompanied her was her husband — and that she would give the applicant a visa while denying him. Without hesitating, the woman responded that he was indeed her husband (though in fact he was not) and that if he was not granted a visa, she would refuse hers. This seemed proof enough for the consular official, and both were granted visas. Kodjo's commentary: it takes this type of "courage" to pass the interview.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Business of Dreams 1 1. Border Practice 27 2. The Interview 45 3. Kinship by Other Means 63 4. Trading Futures 85 5. Embassy Indiscretions 109 6. Protest 124 7. Prison 134 8. America, Here We Come 148 9. Lomé 2018 171 Notes 179 Bibliography 195 Index 207What People are Saying About This
“The Fixer is both an entertaining tale and a deep one. The pages turn quickly as we follow a vivid cast of characters chasing their emigration dreams through various impostures staged by the title character. But while the stories are often funny, the poignant predicament that frames them is deadly serious. A powerful book, illuminating a set of issues that could hardly be more important or timely.”
“The U.S. visa lottery program has been called ‘the planet's most popular game of chance.’ In this utterly riveting book, Charles Piot, among the finest Africanist scholars of our day, takes us—along with consummate ‘fixer,’ the lottery broker Kodjo Nicolas Batema—on an extraordinary journey into the business of dreams, following those seeking a path to America. Along the way, they not only make new lives, they also fashion an organic ‘theory from the South’ about the workings of the contemporary world order. Laced with humor, irony, disappointment, and hope, The Fixer is a truly terrific accomplishment.”