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I once nearly crashed a hire car on the road from Siena to Florence. I would have pled temporary insanity, caused by the sudden appearance around a corner of a flock of beautiful black African women dressed in bras and hot pants.... They were, of course, prostitutes, some of the 1,00O1 young Nigerians2 reckoned to be working in Italy, servicing the estimated nine million Italian men who pay for sex. The girls supply what, it must be presumed, the men cannot get at home-anal sex-and the going rate is [pounds sterling] 150, good money.3
With these unsettling words, Andrew Billen of the New Statesman weaves a tapestry of images that throw light on a new and disturbing trend in the Nigerian commercial sex industry-the omnipresent overseas or international sex worker who, in her eternal state of undress, leaves very little to the imagination. It is this same breed of sex worker that affords her European client services, the likes of which could hardly have been imagined, let alone spoken, a decade or two ago in Nigeria. She is a new-age prostitute who elevates "[her] customer [to] 'king.'"4 So who is this woman and why does she do what she does? The key to understanding who and why, I argue, can be found deeply buried in the past, but it is also firmly rooted in the present as well. She is an emblem of traditional notions of sex and sexuality as well as an inherently corrupt and collapsing nation. Her story begins not in the streets of Siena or Florence, but in rural and urban Nigeria,5 canvassing all of the "junction towns"6 inbetween.
In an attempt to navigate the contours of this uniquely Nigerian institution of commercial sex work, I provide two short case studies-various in ethnicity (the Igbo and Edo), locality (rural Nigeria and international prostitution), and in the very way the practitioners define and construct their work. The story that emerges, I argue, situates the Nigerian sex worker variously as independent and autonomous; interdependent and, at times, completely dependent on her new age madam (boss, if male), "mama," or "Mama Lola," as the case may be.
This study of rural prostitution takes us to the northernmost region of eastern Nigeria-to a group called the...