The Cult Of The Black Man - A White Woman Seduced And Bilked By A Canny Nigerian Scammer

Vicki Cabot gave unusual love a try - not today's meme of lesbian and transgender love and Folsom Street Fair S&M - but love with a Nigerian.

Her mother warned her against the relationship.  'They are scammers to a man', she said.  Her husband who worked for the World Bank had a No Nigeria clause in his contract.  So many of his colleagues had negotiated the same codicil that finding loan officers for the multi-million contracts concluded with the Nigerian government was well nigh impossible. 

'A shithole', said Frank Cabot who had learned his lesson the hard way, traveling to Lagos as a Bank intern, harassed and shaken down at the airport with not enough money to pay the bribes demanded by the taxi driver and hotel clerk, he sought refuge in his embassy after he had given up his silk ties, Rolex, and Armani suspenders.

The reputation of Nigeria was well deserved.  No one came out of there in one piece, thousands were conned by online fraud every day, and most savvy Washingtonians checked cabs for Nigerian drivers before getting in. 

Lagos was a stinking, festering slum.  Whatever money had been realized from the sale of Niger delta oil - before Exxon, Shell, and Gulf had pulled out, went into offshore bank accounts with nothing left to run the country.  In short order the whole country had become a toxic, gang-run, miserable, lawless place. 

'He's a professor', Vicki told her father who was unmoved.  A scam too, he said, informing her of the thousands of fraudulent CVs the Bank got every day from Nigerian 'professors'.  'They scam you coming and going', her father said, 'corrupt, dishonest, shady and nasty from the word go'; but Vicki had been charmed by this suave, polished African who treated her like the Queen of Sheba, and who was as far from the stereotype painted by her father as the man in the moon. 

Or so she thought.  The man, Adrian Adebayo, was as crooked as they come, in the United States on an overstayed tourist visa, and on the prowl for susceptible, credulous, and naive young women like Vicki.

'I hit the jackpot', he told his friends back in Lagos, for Vicki was the heiress of a considerable fortune.  Her father might be an international civil servant on salary, but her inheritance was unimaginable.  The offspring of one of Boston's finest families, first in line among the grandchildren of the patriarch of the family, she was the jewel in the crown. 

Now, why Vicki got caught in this tender trap is a simple story of doing the right thing. At college she had been convinced that the black man was at the top of the human pyramid. but because of slavery, Jim Crow, and persistent racism, he foundered at the bottom.  With effort, desire, and hard work, American society would be soon reconfigured and the black man would be restored to his primal place. 

Nonsense, of course. Brown University was not exactly an unbiased institution of higher learning, and had been coopted by social reformists and was now fully in their hands.  The administration, the faculty, and the students were all part of the same political cabal. The whole campus marched to the same drummer, flew the same flag, and prayed to the same gods. 

Where possible young white girls hooked up with black men, admitted to the university under a liberal affirmative action program, and who like every pimp from the ghetto were on the prowl for nubile white girls. There was a pecking order among the student body at Brown.  At the top were girls dating black men, then girls in lesbian relationships, then gay men together, and finally bi-sexual students who were testing the waters but had not yet committed to one side or the other.

Vicki, was an unfortunately homely girl who might have inherited Grandfather Cabot's money but none of the patrician, graceful look of the women of the family. Somewhere along the line she got a Jewish look - sallow skin, prominent nose and lips, and untamable hair.  She was often asked by her Brown classmates if she had changed her name. 

She was the perfect mark for Adrian Adebayo - a homely woman trained in the fantasies of cultural diversity and the myth of the black man.  The way into her treasury was as simple as could be.   

Vicki was not Adrian's first score.  He had been quite the man about town, showing up at progressive conferences, seminars, and public events.  He had enough money to keep him above water until he hit the jackpot - his second cousin had made his fortune in a devious but impressive Somali-like fraud in Atlanta, a Ponzi scheme where millions were invested in shell companies, and all of it siphoned off to Aruban banks. 

He had almost made it.  If it hadn't been for an annoyingly investigative father, he would have tied the knot with Alison Parker, a girl like Vicki born and bred in a culture of privilege and wealth and a graduate of Duke (where she had been immersed in the same cauldron of diversity and black idolatry as Brown).  

To her tears and flapdoodle, he left town before the old man called in ICE; but he had learned his lesson.  Chicanery has its limits, and the careful plotter must cross all the American t's and dot all the i's. 

Adrian and Vicki got married over the wild protests of her parents. His visa was regularized, the path to citizenship assured, and the marriage contract concluded without punitive codicils.  In short order he was legal, free, and rich, and was never heard from again. 

Now, Vicki, chastened, humiliated, and shamed should have at least admitted her 'miscalculation' as she called it, apologized to her father for having dismissed his warnings, and gone on to a more stable emotional and political life.

But she insisted that Adrian was a good man, and to throw him in with a bunch of thieves and worse to condemn an entire country and a whole continent was wrong, exactly the kind of racist opinions that set back the cause of the black man for decades. She had been blinded by his attentions, his demeanor and yes, although the hated to admit it, by his extraordinary sexual endowment.  

This had always been the worst racial stereotype in the white grab bag, but when it turned out to be true, she was as surprised as any white, liberal woman would be, but quite happy about it.  Serviced by this black man every night was a pleasure few women could imagine. 

No, Adrian might have had his faults; and yes, she was bilked and deceived by him, but all the more reason to blame colonialism for the persistent underdevelopment of Africa. He was a victim of oppression and racism, and it was white people's duty - her duty - to fight for the black man wherever he lived. 

Vicki was a defiantly unreconstructed liberal.  The roots of progressivism planted during her Brown days were still deep and strong.  Other weaker, less committed women might have turned conservative, tossed aside the whole idea of cultural diversity, and stuck to their own kind; but not Vicki. Political commitment and the philosophy which provides its foundation are not so easily dismissed.  She would be lifelong progressive, a believer in racial justice, and the lover of a proud black man.