Across contemporary African literature, hustlers appear as online scammers, sex workers, undocumented migrants, and others who pursue self-advancement through unconventional or compromising means. African Hustler Narratives asks what these figures reveal when we look beyond the familiar discourse of morality or criminality. Daniel Chukwuemeka argues that the hustler’s pursuit of self-advancement through improvised means constitutes a response to structural exclusion from global capitalism, which a purely moral or criminal framing misses entirely. 

Moving from earlier forms of hustling to the digital world of e-fraud, Chukwuemeka shows how African writers use these morally complicated figures to explore economic inequality and the difficult choices that arise when the neoliberal promise of opportunity collides with the realities of systemic exclusion. Chukwuemeka also extends the hustler motif to those who tell and study these stories. Though their work differs from the e-scammer’s, African writers and critics negotiate Global North publishing and academic valuation systems that reproduce the disparities they interrogate, making the e-scammer their doppelgänger.

Daniel Chukwuemeka is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Northumbria and a Lecturer at Godfrey Okoye University.