And the Chicken played the Chorale

The businessman is having his shoes shined by a cheerful teenage boy by the roadside. The mobile phone rings. The big man searches his suit pockets and briefcase but it is the boy who whips his phone out of his back pocket and, without missing a brush stroke, makes an appointment later in the day to shine his caller’s shoes.

This advertisement on Uganda television delighted everyone as they identified with the youth’s cheerfulness and ambition and also realised how their assumptions had been challenged. Mobile phones were now not for the elite alone but for everyone.

Other advertisements showed children calling grandma in the village, and later in very funny vignettes, instantly recognisable characters: the typical ‘briefcase’ businessman with a phone at each ear whose third phone then rings, the woman in the village who instinctively kneels according to her culture when her husband rings, the hairdresser who absently-minded pours water over her client’s face while talking to her boyfriend on the mobile.

Phones for the people

By 2000 when the shoe-shine boy advert aired, the South African company MTN had smashed the monopoly of the existing mobile company, which had priced its phones and services out of the reach of more than a handful of the elite. Now, for less than $100 you could have a phone on the spot, sold by trained salesgirls and boys who were polite to you, cheerfully explained how it worked and you didn’t even have to give your name or fill in a form.

What a contrast with the situation before, when to get a telephone you had to fill in a four-page form with a photograph, get counter-signatures from four levels of local government and then wait and wait, even if you had agreed to give a little something to the installation engineer. In 1990 Uganda had fewer than 1000 business and domestic phones with access outside East Africa. In 2006 there were more than a million ‘mobiles’, all capable of calling anyone in the world.

People often choose communication over other items. A survey that rattled the beer companies in Uganda asked people in the ubiquitous chicken, pork and beer roadside joints what they would buy if they had only $5 left at the end of the evening. The majority chose a phone card over more beer, something which also had real implications for the economy as all the phone card revenue leaves the country, since the phone companies are basically foreign, whereas the beer at least is brewed in Uganda.

It is astonishing how people in ‘officially’ poor countries afford phones, or at least phone calls. Throughout Africa used phone cards litter the streets, even in very ‘deprived’ quarters. I recall being at a seminar in Kinshasa where someone challenged some of the assumptions of NGOs by asking how come, if people were so poor, even the poorer quartiers were littered with discarded phone cards. The person posing the question became pretty unpopular, confirming once again that one should never challenge the humanitarian agencies’ premise that the people are poor!

Of course the cards do not indicate that everyone has a phone. People load up other people’s phones with units they have bought, so they can use them. There are commercial phone providers who sit by the road side with a mobile and live on the tiny excess they charge you to call on their phone. In Uganda one of the companies made its service even better by having ‘fixed mobiles’ that used the mobile network but were in a shop or on a little table. There are also some extra-mobile mobiles rigged up in a sort of booth on the back of a bicycle and circulating the markets. As you would shout Boda! to get a cyclist-taximan to come to pick you up, you shout Phone! and it cycles in a leisurely manner towards you.

When mobile companies started billing in seconds, rather than whole minutes, there was a sudden explosion of roadside ‘simu ya jamii’ (family phones) where you bought a fixed number of seconds, typically in Kenya for 5 shillings (a sixteenth of a dollar). Just enough to say: ‘I am on my way home’ or ‘What colour did you want?’

People adapt to mobiles

Cultural habits have had to adapt as mobile phones have spawned a new culture. Most people are on pre-paid (pay-as-you-go). This means you yourself have paid for your minutes, or seconds, and you are going to treasure them. This is not your boss’s office line which you could use all day.

Gone now are the long Luganda greetings I learned, which start as you spy your friend coming towards you along the village path with ‘Osibye otyanno … bulungi ssebo … mmm …. Eeee …. Mmmm …’ and continuing politely after you have exchanged the formal news (always ‘good’ of course) about family, cattle, crops and so on.

That costs you UNITS which you have paid for. Now, the maximum you can spare is ‘ki?’ or ‘oli okya?’ [Hi! How is it?].

You can talk at length when someone else is paying, but politeness has a battle with economy when you have called someone senior like your father. Quite often I find the person who called me trying to find a quick and polite way to put an end to my ramblings, because he is paying for the call. Occasionally they just cut you off. After all, batteries are always going dead; it’s an excuse everyone has used.

In Congo the old chunky phones displayed LOBATT a word now used universally there to describe any temporary loss of powers. Yes, that too.

It is noticeable how fast people can talk when it is costing them money! The phone companies must make more money if people have to talk in French or English because they are spoken much slower. With Swahili, Lingala or pidgin or a mother-tongue, it goes much, much faster. The Somalis may well hold the record after years of experience on short-wave radios, the only communication after the state collapsed. This has also lead them to treat the mobile more like a megaphone, shouting into them irrespective of the company they are in.

Everyone learns the subtleties of each network’s tariffs and they learn to count the time in their heads. The traditional African good memory kicks in here also. There is an uncanny ability to remember huge strings of numbers, even though the phone has a memory. [I am hard put to remember my own number, and am quite embarrassed by this; I just ask the person nearest me what my number is, should I actually need to know.]

Mobiles and youth

It is with Africa’s youth, just like everywhere, that the mobile has become a central part of culture. A boy without a phone, like the Somali youth without a gun, is, in his own eyes, nothing. It is the single most desirable object from the age of 12 up.

What city girl will go out with a boy if he isn’t able to give her a phone, or if she has one already, at least be pretty generous with phone cards?

How do you juggle your life these days, especially your love life, without a phone? To people who are AM (ante-mobile), it probably seems as though it was easier before the mobile phone but the phone makes it more exciting, and you have to be on your toes! There is the decision about whether to let the person you called know your number, because she might not answer when she sees your number. There is also beeping.

Beeping

Beeping or flashing when you don’t have units is another specific exercise. The fine art of ringing someone and cutting off before he answers is called beeping or flashing. It is done to save money. Some, usually students, who are always broke, keep just enough credit in the phone so they can beep. A student who is in boarding school and has run out of money will count on his mother, at least, to call her back when she beeps. She might well text you some phone credit as well, another art which is finely developed.

Between boy and girl it can be a trial of emotions. Will he call back? Will she just beep back? If it is part of an emotional game it has to be played carefully. Has he rejected you or he also simply doesn’t have units?

sms

Then there is the SMS, much cheaper than a call, and bearing close resemblance to the telegram in that it is necessary to be sparing with words. Look carefully as you sit in a seminar or long meeting and you’ll see that a few people are twiddling their fingers just below the facilitator’s line of sight. These are the inveterate texters catching up on various things, running their offices or their social life. I am one of them and make no apology for it. SMS has given everyone the freedom to multi-task, to use the long periods of boredom while waiting for something to happen or to finish, to send messages all over the world. I try to send messages in good English or French, but most people don’t bother, especially if they have not mastered predictive texting. Even those of us who think we have mastered it are capable of sending off ‘on fire’ instead of ’no fire’ or ‘me’ instead of ‘of’.

The fad for text language with its abbreviations (‘w8 4 me’) can make for problems when the basic knowledge of the language already shaky anyway, but we manage to understand most of the time.

SMS are international and have greatly added to the irritation of the diaspora, illegal migrant or otherwise, in Europe and North America as their family members back at home text them incessantly asking them to send money.

The BBC has greatly increased participation in its Africa service programmes with the use of SMS and so has East African TV which runs text greetings along the bottom of the screen. At a more personal level, last Christmas I had invited a few friends for dinner but the person who was to cook it was running late on a bus coming back from Nairobi. We prepared everything under his text instructions until he swept in with his backpack, two hours before the guests were to arrive and took over.

Inventiveness and adaptability

Mobile phones also give full play to the inventiveness and enterprise of youth. You can buy a cheap ‘locked’ telephone on a contract in London and have it unlocked anywhere in Africa for about $20. Local companies tried to restrict buyers with contracts but no one was having any of it. People wanted to use the freedom of choosing their own tariffs; having two phones (or more likely two SIM cards) is common.

All sorts of accessories are on sale everywhere from new ‘faces’ to flashing phone covers, to different types of earphone. As so often in Africa you can keep something going so much longer than you can in Europe (though bad handling and the climate may also hasten their eventual demise – it is astonishing how many people sit on their phones, or wash them in their shirts, or lose them in the pit latrine).

Every element of a call can be rented or subcontracted. You can pay to have your phone charged in towns that have no electricity. You go for a swim and the lifeguard will put your phone somewhere with everyone else’s and tell you when it rings.

In villages that are just beyond the coverage of the local transmitter entrepreneurs build towers to catch the signal and charge you to climb up. For a year or so the refugee camps at Adjumani were not in the reception zone of any of the companies, except for one tiny patch at one end of the airstrip, and on one termite mound near town where you could make and receive calls. One of the snapshots I never took, to my regret, is of people lining up to climb the termite mound to make calls!

Phones and domination

One of the major indications of the power Rwanda held over Eastern Congo was when their sole mobile company put up huge masts on the hills of the two border towns leading into Congo, providing mobile service to Goma and Bukavu, but much more importantly to their troops deep inside Congo. Rwandacell became a symbol in the conflict with people demonstrating against Rwanda’s hegemony by tearing up their phone cards (after using them of course) to protest Tutsi domination of Eastern Congo.

Generally speaking only a government can do that. Any overflow to another country is usually accidental, though people will take advantage of price differentials. The fact that most phones in the world are GSM and use the same style of SIM card also assists when moving from one country to another. At one time I carried as many as 8 SIM cards around as I travelled. Roaming in Africa is still not common and when it exists it is very expensive.

Now in Southern Sudan

We were all left to wonder then when the new SPLM authorities in South Sudan approved a non-GSM system in Rumbek and Yei. Was it a deliberate continuation of the rebels’ long-standing, and in the days of satellites, meaningless policy of restricting communication, or was it just a mistake? Or more likely, had that entrepreneur got to the right official first?

Whatever it is, South Sudan will go through the same phases as every other country. People will answer their phones in seminars, forget to put them on ‘silent’, use their seniority to get away with being very rude, answering all phones whenever they ring. And, interestingly, this will all sort itself out in a few months. Now it’s actually fairly rare to hear a phone ring in company; most people put them on ‘vibrate’.

Its own set of jokes

The mobile has also spawned its own stories and urban myths; inevitably, given its close connection with all aspects of social life.

Finding your phone

A man noticed that his phone had disappeared while he was having beer and roast chicken in one of the ubiquitous ‘joints’ around Kampala. When you ‘miss’ your phone you call it immediately from another phone and it will ring, unless it has been stolen and the thief has turned it off. In this case it rang quite near, the classical piece he had chosen. In fact, the Ode to Joy.

But where was it coming from? Triangulating in, they reached the chicken boy’s barbecue grill, and there it was, inside one of the cooked chickens waiting to be sold. The boy had lifted the phone with some dirty plates and stuffed it into the chicken.

There were endless reports of phones going off in embarrassing places, like the phone of your friend ringing in your own marital bedroom when you call him. But then Charles and Diana had a bit of a problem like that when Last Number Redial first started.

The phone and the boss

When I was head of the UNICEF sub-office in Goma I was told that Carol Bellamy the head of the agency was coming for 36 hours. Now, heads of UNICEF offices quail at such a visit, which could only be likened to a tsunami coming, and caused at least as much stress as the day a few months later the town was sliced in two by a lava flow.

We had the usual contradictory advance programmes, the usual confusing instructions and of course we more or less stopped everything for the visit. Fellow victims e-mailed me from all over the world giving me advice. One told me: never, ever, let her be separated from her luggage.

Just before the visit I got an e-mail from her office asking me to make sure that a phone would be available for her and to send the number. This I did and added a couple of flippant remarks confirming that it would have international access and that she could call ‘Tallahassee, Schenectady and ..’ without problems’. When I next checked my e-mail there was a flood of messages from top to bottom of the UNICEF hierarchy. I hadn’t noticed that my reply had been automatically copied to Carol herself. Though there was nothing but a few flippant words I was given to understand that I would probably be hung, drawn and quartered, by my own boss first and then by everyone else. I was guilty of lese-majesté.

The day dawned, she arrived on time. My boss, Martin Mogwanja, from Kinshasa came first out of the executive jet, and promptly fell down the steps, injuring his knee. Then, Bill, the security officer who came with them from Kinshasa, without consulting anyone, re-organised the convoy we had set up so carefully. In one of those awful inevitabilities her luggage went to the wrong hotel, because of this re-organisation of the convoy. As Martin sat nursing his knee, and I tried to make small talk while trying to solve the luggage problem on the mobile glued to my ear, I felt my last days had come.

Well, the luggage arrived, the visit went well, despite Carole deciding on our field trip to distribute the lunch sandwiches herself on the plane back from Lake Albert, so I had to run round retrieving the pork ones from the Muslims.

She was interested, very well-informed and pleasant, reserving strong remarks (she can limit her vocabulary to very few short pungent words) for deserving targets. Then having changed in my office for the next lap, she handed me back the phone and laughed and said, well, I didn’t call Tallahassee!

An anti-poverty device

It was not long before Ugandans discovered the business and marketing advantages of mobiles and developed many inventive uses for them. Today an NGO called Foodnet provides national commodity prices by SMS and has wiped out exploitative middlemen by letting the farmer know directly what today’s price for rice, or matooke (cooking banana), or sim-sim is in the main towns.

On the lakes fishermen catch the huge Nile perch, phone up a Kampala hotel from their dugout canoe, bargain and sell it, and then call their cooperative to have a pick-up van with ice waiting at the landing site to rush it to the hotel before lunch. None of this was possible before; perishable commodities were sold for next to nothing to rapacious middlemen.

Whatever you call it (Mobairu, portable, mobailo, cellullaire for starters) the mobile phone is a true anti-poverty device. The fixed and clunky Internet cannot yet fulfil this role.

Opening up the political space, uniting the people

The mobile phone had an astounding effect in the Congo after the country reunified in 2003. People who had lost contact for years could talk to each other. Just as when the phones started again in Goma (courtesy of those huge Rwanda towers) the day after the volcanic eruption people could call across the hot lava to find out what had happened to their house or the rest of the family, people in Bukavu or Kisangani could call their relatives in Kinshasa or Lubumbashi and begin to catch up with their news.

There was another side. In Bunia the militias and their warlords and their representatives in Kinshasa also used the phones to communicate. I wondered sometimes if the occasional cutting off of phone service was to prevent this but over my time there I saw no evidence that the warlords’ phones were being tapped either by the government or by UN forces, though this would have been a sensible thing to do.

In Uganda Joseph Kony, the rebel leader, used to call FM radio phone-in programmes from the bush. It was this that made people realise that the government was not very serious about capturing him, since even if they could not triangulate to find him the should certainly be able to detect whatever generator he was using in the bush to charge the phones.

Drama at the VIP lounge

One day in Uganda I was in a communal taxi coming back from giving lectures at Nkumba University. There was a sudden excitement among the rest of the passengers. They were listening to one of the numerous FM radios which was relaying the voice of someone calling excitedly in. He was calling from the VIP lounge at the airport, not far from where we were. He was an ordinary citizen (OK, not quite, as he was in the VIP lounge) who was witnessing the attempted arrest, or kidnap, by plain-clothes men of a politician who had just defected from the ruling party to join the not-quite-legal opposition.

The breathless reporting by him and others was blow by blow as the target resisted arrest; at one point the German Ambassador intervened and sat on the politician to try to prevent him being carried away. He was finally taken away on some spurious grounds, but the government had been extremely embarrassed and the man was released not long after. The mobile phone and the FM radio had triumphed. So had democracy.

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Appendix

E-mail or mobile?

The internet spread slowly across Africa at the same time as the mobile was spreading by leaps and bounds. By 2000 most towns had an internet café (in fact ‘café’ now means Internet Café in several countries). When you looked into the café what did you see? Nine young men to one woman. Many doing e-mail, more consulting pornographic sites, and a very few looking anything else up. Now it is changing, in the big cities, and curiously, in Somalia, there are more women, and certain types of business research goes on, like into the sale of second-hand cars from Japan or Dubai.

Many more people are using e-mail, or like the heavily veiled girls you see in Somali internet cafés, instant messaging. Yet, compared to the mobile phone the internet has several disadvantages, starting with the problems of setting it up, maintaining an electricity supply and paying for the line.

I recently watched a person who was just learning about the Internet and was keen to get on line, stumble over the ten to twelve necessary steps from switching on the computer, clicking on icons, through Windows, passwords and other paraphernalia. Even when he reached his e-mail he was completely fazed by the task of sorting out the adverts from the text. Compare this with the way the mobile phone has developed: no wires, simple buttons, portability and privacy.

In Mozambique in 2000, an Australian benevolent foundation connected a teacher’s training college to the Internet. There were three computers, one was in the principal’s office and always worked but no one else had access to it.

One was in the common room. It was usually broken down.

There was one in the library ‘for reference’. A quick glance round the library showed that there was no reference culture in the college. The book ‘selection’ was a set of random donations, not even all in Portuguese. The dusty books, even the encyclopaedias, were virtually never used because the teaching style did not require any independent research. For the library, read Internet.

By contrast, the mobile phone is simple and elegant. You carry it in your hand; it’s ready to work immediately, and in the form of SMS it serves as a sort of simple e-mail. A quick look anywhere in Africa will show that it is the mobile phone which is the really revolutionary device, ensuring a massive flow of information between individuals, saving time and increasing individuals’ efficiency, where transport is poor and mass media slow and not always accurate.

The mobile phone is a precision instrument compared to the blunt tool of the Internet.

Barry Sesnan

Entebbe 2006