Introduction

In a majority of African countries, urban youths are one of the main ‘victims of modernity’ (Bauman 2007). Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, they have endured social and economic marginalisation that has frustrated many in their legitimate aspirations of fulfilling their dreams of modernity. In addition, as a result of their disenfranchisement and de-citizenisation by corrupt and clientelist African governments, marginalised urban youths have become the ‘lost generation’. Some of them have been turned into ‘alien citizens’ who are treated as foreigners in their own country. But despite their undoubted ‘debasement’ and ‘disconnection’ from the mainstream of both the local and global economies, African youths are far from being hapless victims or passive subjects (see Ferguson 1999). As a matter of fact, some recent studies have attested to the extraordinary ability of marginalised urban African youths not only to adapt to modern changes but also to invent new opportunities for enrichment in a context of austerity, drastic structural adjustment measures, and the dwindling of state resources that in the past had enabled postcolonial leaders to maintain the social balance and order (Bayart 1993; Hibou 2004).

This is the case with young successful Nigerian and Cameroonian confidence tricksters generally referred to in Nigeria as ‘419’ conmen and in Cameroon as feymen. Most of them are formerly underprivileged urban youths who have managed through sophisticated business frauds, large-scale deceptions, and confidence tricks to gain access to material and financial resources from which they were previously excluded.