Afrobeats celebrates cybercrime and it’s becoming a global problem

Afrobeats celebrates cybercrime and it’s becoming a global problem

When former US secretary of state Colin Powell took to a London stage alongside Nigerian artist Olu Maintain in 2008 and danced to a song called Yahoozee, he almost certainly didn’t know that the track is widely understood in Nigeria as a celebration of internet fraud. The moment became a striking illustration of something my research keeps returning to: how music can carry the moral codes of cybercrime far beyond their origins, laundering them …