The guest is Charles Piot, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African and African American Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, whose work examines the political economy of West Africa and the enduring legacies of colonialism in rural and urban Togo. The conversation centers on his book The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles (2019), co-authored with Kodjo Nicolas Batema and honored with the 2020 Victor Turner Prize in ethnographic writing. 

The book follows Batema himself — a Togolese visa broker, or “fixer” — as he guides clients through the visa lottery. Piot captures the whole improvised world around it: the street frenzy of the sign-up period, the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview, and the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers. Selected applicants will sometimes “marry” a sponsor’s before the interview at the US Embassy in Lomé, assembling files of marriage papers and wedding photos to prove the relationships — what Piot calls a “game of chance and numbers — casino citizenship.”