Ponzi Schemes as Africa’s Twenty-First-Century Shylocks: Complicities in Femi Osofisan’s Love’s Unlike Lading: A Comedy from Shakespeare and Fires Burn and Die Hard

Abstract

This article equates the antics of Shakespeare’s Shylock with Ponzi schemes in contemporary Africa. Given the paucity of literary works on Ponzi schemes, it focuses on Nigeria to invoke a correspondence between usury and Ponzi schemes, using the former as a metaphor philosophically to account for the latter. Its discoveries afford an intertextual critique of Nigerian author Femi Osofisan’s Love’s Unlike Lading, its prototype, Merchant of Venice, and Fires Burn and Die Hard. With the background of New Historicism and intertextual theories, this study reconceptualizes Shakespeare’s Shylock as Ponzi schemes, which are economic wolves in the dress of a humanitarian lamb, as they take more than a pound of flesh from investors who are effectively complicit in their own predicaments. It signals a place for literature in the quest for authorities and cybersecurity professionals to rid Africa and cyberspace of get-rich-quick schemes.