The term ‘419’ is drawn from the article in the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. However, it has transcended its origins in statute and become shorthand for trickery across West Africa. When I worked as a correspondent in Sierra Leone, 1,400 miles from Nigeria’s capital Abuja, the phrase was in widespread use.
Deception is fertile ground for fiction, and Will Ferguson has produced a fine novel from the West African variant. He takes 419 in its purest form: the email scam. Nigerian hustlers persuade foreigners to part with their savings, often with the promise of a tranche of a fortune that just needs a western bank account to park in.
Here the bait is 15 per cent of ‘THIRTY FIVE MILLION SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars US,’ thus capitalised in a transatlantic email exchange. The scammer is Winston, a young operator in Lagos, Nigeria’s muggy commercial capital. Winston’s victim is Henry Curtis, a retired Canadian schoolteacher.
The novel opens as Curtis’s car plunges down an embankment.
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