Some years back, a collective of DJs in Cape Town's underground music scene began The Fong Kong Bantu Sound System. Their inspiration came from the “spazas of Soweto or the bazaars of Grey Street”, where “we see fake consumer goods flooding our world and our minds” – be it in the form of endless rows of “shoes with fake Nike logos, ‘Diesel’ t‐shirts [or] badly pirated DVDs” (2010). Fong Kong's hype and swagger are double delights that aid in an analysis of South Africa's obsession with race purity, and critique more recent western obsessions, post 9/11, for circumscribing and limiting ‘the real’, whilst describing that which is outside those borders as criminal/other. Imraan Coovadia, in Green‐Eyed Thieves, explicitly links apartheid‐era obsessions with categorising and containing people with those of the post‐9/11 world: both are systems driven by the desire to define what is ‘real’ and what is Fong Kong – where ambiguous origins, allegiances, and the appearance of the terrorist foe intensifies fears. The protagonists of Coovadia's novel – the twins, Firoze and Ashraf – are classic cosmopolitans and tricksters, whose ability to refashion and reconstruct their identities adds to the modern state's fear of mobile bodies. Their physical markers straddle multiple categories, allowing them to pass, as long as the names displayed in their forged passports resemble those of the favoured ethnic group of the moment. Firoze and Ashraf's trajectories mock the law and our terror of the Global Nomad – particularly in the form of the Global Muslim – in an age that has come to glorify plurality and mobility for only the select.