The Mutable Original: How Chinese Counterfeits Become Nigerian Originals in African Markets

Abstract

Affordable Chinese copies of Western brands are ubiquitous in African markets. Despite democratizing consumer access, these goods appear to cement hegemonic value hierarchies that rank Chinese or local products as inferior to Western goods. To unsettle this implicit geography of fakes and dominant politics of authentication, scholars have proposed a continuum of hybrid identities—from genuine fakes to copied originals—seeking to collapse a simplistic dichotomy between originals and counterfeits. This article argues the opposite: Upholding this dichotomy is crucial for Nigerian entrepreneurs operating in counterfeit economies to stake original claims by means other than being “first” or “from the West,” often impossible production conditions to satisfy. Following a well-known Spanish brand of soaps and lotions, Idole, and other Western cosmetics brands in Nigerian markets and on e-commerce platforms, this ethnographic study shows how improving quality, concentrating quantity, and expanding the variety of fakes offer new epistemological possibilities for what makes an original original. Counterfeits become originals when performance distorts primacy and where popularity inverts provenance. Informed by Chinese philosophies on copying, the “mutable original” captures sellers’ and buyers’ paradoxical indifference to copying and investment in originals, along with the commercial and cultural contexts that nurture these seemingly counterintuitive interests.