“Where Maga Falls, Guyman Go Wack”: Recollections of the Igbo Tortoise Figure in Selected Cybercrime Narratives

Abstract

Where “Maga” Falls, “Guyman” Go Wack is a Nigerian cybercrime slang that metaphorises scamming a “Maga”, a potential victim. This sarcasm is often channelled towards the maga, whose “fall” is a “blessing” (wack) for the smart “guyman.” The ambivalence of “maga falls and guyman wack” dominates the internet scamming discourse where the contemporary trickster, the guyman, not only exhausts the entire wittiness to entrap the victim to do his bid, but also trivialises the deadly crime scheme as a game of wits in order to boost his ego towards committing more crimes. This popular modern attitude, which appears to have streamed from an overrated admirable qualities of the trickster figure explains the morale of this study. I examine deceitful strategies in two selected cybercrime narratives of Igbo authors (a novel and a short story) as well as six selected Igbo trickster (Tortoise) tales in order to reveal the shared similarities of trickery strategies of con protagonists that are worlds apart, where the tricksters’ egoism foreshadows self-imposed calamity. Using the Jungean Theory of Collective Consciousness, I reveal the belief of self-destruction as a traditional restraint measure to excessive opportunism where treachery constitutes a metaphor for brevity of life and other misfortunes.