Constant Touch

by Jon Agar

  Across the world a split had developed, by the late 1990s, between those who paid for mobile phones by monthly bills, and who therefore registered personal details and submitted to credit checks, and those – the young, the poor – who used prepaid services, usually by purchasing top-up cards, which had a lower starting cost (but often higher call charges), and who as a result remained anonymous. Text messaging was encouraged by the use of top-up cards, since to eke out the minutes it was better to use fractions of a second to send a text than waste whole minutes in conversation. (Indeed, texting was sometimes made free as an enticement to new customers.) In the United States text messaging was not popular, since phones were incompatible and the cost advantages mattered less to the affluent. (Plus, beepers and pagers had a prevalence unmatched elsewhere in the world.) As a result, mobile culture is far less rich in America than in texting hotspots such as Finland, Italy, the United Kingdom or, particularly, the ‘text capital of the world’, the Philippines. According to Rodolfo Salalima, the vice-president of lead Filipino carrier Globe Telecom, about 80 per cent of his company’s customers used pre-paid cards, and the cheapest phone card cost about $5 and was good for two months. In an agricultural, Catholic country where the extended family was important, but also an industrialising country where the young were drawn or forced to the cities, $5 bought cohesion. The outcome was that by 2001 not only did the Filipino elite communicate by cellphone, but the rest of the population, vast and previously poorly connected, possessed anonymous text message-enabled phones too.

  Text messaging played a key role in ousting Estrada. In late 2000, rumours spread as fast as fingers could text: true, exaggerated and imagined stories of Estrada’s corruption. Over 100 million text messages flew around the Philippines each day. It started with jokes such as: ‘The NPA [communist rebels] have kidnapped Erap [Estrada’s nickname, which means ‘buddy’ backwards in Tagalog]. They are demanding a large ransom and, if it is not paid, they are threatening to release their hostage.’ (To illustrate the indiscriminate power of text, another hoax announcing the death of the Pope was also passed on by millions.) As push came to shove, people were texted: ‘edsa. edsa: everybody converge on edsa’ – Edsa being the shrine that was the focus of the challenge to Estrada. While it was only after the cabinet had defected to the opposition, and the army and the police had transferred allegiance, that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was swept to the presidency in January 2001, it was also ‘people power’ brought together by text messaging that forced them to shift in the first place.

  Macapagal-Arroyo acted straight away to ban ‘malicious, profane and obscene’ texts, which offered some protection against her predecessor’s fate, but she has not been allowed to forget the power of text. In September 2001, Smart Communications and Globe Telecom announced that free texting would be reduced. Immediately, Txtpower, a group formed by cellular phone subscribers, organised the sending of at least 1 million text messages to President Macapagal-Arroyo starting the following day, urging her to intervene to save free text messaging and to take action to improve the alleged ‘lousy’ services of the phone firms. Likewise, when in May 2002 President Arroyo announced plans for a tax on text messaging – the country’s public debt was $50 billion, or 70 per cent of GDP – Txtpower and sympathetic politicians reacted angrily. For them, free texting was equated with freedom of Filipino expression.

  The story of the Philippines shows, once again, that mobile phones are moulded by the countries in which they are used, and help to shape the nation in return, but it also acts as a reminder of another theme of this book: the shift away from centralised, hierarchical modes of organisation towards decentralised networks. This was not driven by technological change, although new technologies, of which the mobile phone and the internet were prime examples, symbolised and supported it. Instead they reflected the great shift in models of governance – that is to say, the ways in which decisions were taken and acted upon by organisations, be they government, industry or NGO.

  Chapter 15

  Two organisations in the Congo

  In early 2001, Mount Nyiragongo, one of Africa’s most active volcanoes, erupted. The lava flow passed through the centre of Goma, a Congolese city on the edge of Lake Kivu near the border with Rwanda. In the 1990s it had been the temporary home of the Rwandan Hutu refugees, many responsible for genocide, as well as the centre for the Rwandan-backed rebellion against Laurent Kabila’s Congolese regime. Many who were part of the second wave of refugees, leaving Goma to escape from the advancing lava, recalled the miserable experience of the Hutus, and were determined to stay in the camps for as short a time as possible. Around Goma, therefore, two styles of organisation mattered.

  The first was represented, in the absence of the distant Kabila government, by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the charities. These were organisations with clear centres, distributing aid along chains of command. The second was formed of the centreless networks of gossip, given technological form by the mobile phone. As CNN reported: ‘An unlikely adversary has emerged in the battle to bring relief to the victims of the Congo volcano tragedy – the mobile phone.’ Oxfam worker Rob Wilkinson said that while aid agencies were telling people not to return to the city of Goma and to stay in the refugee camps, mobile phone calls were persuading them to return. ‘They are using mobile phones to talk to relatives and friends back in Goma, who are telling them that it is OK to go back,’ he told the Press Association. ‘It is changing the way the population is responding. It’s very unusual.’

  Interestingly, what can be a problem for the aid agencies – the self-organisation of mobile populations – can also be turned into a helpful tool. Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, many of the population of Port-au-Prince fled the capital city. But relief agencies needed to know where essential supplies, such as fresh water and medicines, should be directed. Swedish and American researchers realised that mobile signal traffic could be quickly and cheaply traced to draw a picture of human movement. While it was too late to be of use in the aftermath of the earthquake, this tool was ready when an outbreak of cholera occurred ten months later.

  Chapter 16

  M-Africa

  The changes, opportunities and challenges sparked by the introduction of mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa provide some of the most extraordinary stories in the global history of the cellphone. Typically, mobile phones were introduced in a context where existing landlines were expensive, exclusive and often unreliable. In Nigeria in the late 1980s, for example, a single national telecoms company, NITEL, provided a mere 500,000 landlines for a population of over 100 million people. Early analogue mobile phones were equally restricted to an elite. When GSM digital mobile phones were introduced, in the early 1990s, possession rocketed, reaching 7 million subscribers by 2004. By 2011, six in ten households in a population of 160 million had access to a mobile phone, reflecting a similar proportion of subscriptions.

  This pattern, to a greater or lesser extent, can be seen across Africa. Between 1998 and 2003, with the roll-out of African national GSM networks, often in competition with each other, mobile phone networks grew by 5,000 per cent. This growth rate was higher than the global average. In South Africa, by 2010, there were comfortably more mobile phone subscriptions than there were people, a penetration level greater than that found in France. In some countries where there has been a particularly weak central authority, this growth has been particularly rapid. In Somalia, also by 2010, for example, about a third of the population had a mobile phone. Even among the countries that global authorities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund list as the poorest (per capita) in the world, mobile phones have been purchased and used in surprising numbers: 14 per hundred of the population in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 41 per hundred in Liberia and 60 per hundred in Zimbabwe, to give 2010 figures. The demand has been intense enough to cause conflicts. For example, in November 2004, Conakry
, the capital of Guinea, was shaken by riots as customers took out their frustration on the state telephone company, Sotelgi, when a promised delivery of new SIM cards failed to reach them, having been snatched up by middlemen.

  A buyer uses two mobile phones as he prepares to conclude a deal on a camel at the livestock market in the desert village of Sakabal, Niger, in 2012. (Press Association)

  Mobile phones are cheaper to use than landlines in Africa, which is part of their attraction. However, if we take Tanzania in 2005 as an example, a mobile phone might cost $50 to purchase and a call would cost 30 US cents a minute, while many Tanzanians lived on less than one dollar a day. Most of the money went to the mobile phone company (African Vodacom, based in South Africa, was the leading company in the case of Tanzania), but the fee might also include a chunk that went to the government in the form of a revenue surcharge. Mobile phones, as we all know, are tempting things to overuse. In Nigeria, the wry local name for a phone is oku na iri ego, which means ‘the fire that consumes money’. The cost, especially of voice communication, has been therefore a substantial concern, especially for poorer consumers. This stark economic fact has shaped distinctive patterns of mobile phone acquisition, use and disposal across sub-Saharan Africa.

  While brand new mobile phones are, of course, available for purchase in African cities and towns, there are also well-developed networks of redistribution which circulate old mobile phones from Europe, the Far East and the United States for resale. Jon Mooallem traced and described some of these networks in the New York Times in 2008. Most old American cellphones are just thrown away or left in a drawer. Some, beyond repair, might be sold to industrial recyclers such as the Belgian company Umicore, which once specialised in extracting the mineral wealth of the Congo but now smelts down ‘e-waste’ (electronic device rubbish) in an enormous facility in Antwerp, skimming out the valuable metals, including gold.

  But many other phones, unwanted in the United States because they are months out of fashion, are fed into the chains of redistribution and resale. One route involves Pakistani wholesalers based in Kowloon, Hong Kong, orchestrating the movement of containers full of phones and shipping them from the United States to China. Nigerians then buy the phones in batches of tens of thousands and bring them to Lagos. From there the phones are passed out to sellers in Nigerian streets and markets.

  Once fitted with new local SIM cards, the phones are ready to use. An African mobile customer needs three things: a phone (still expensive, even when second-hand, but often, as we will see, an investment), a SIM card, and a way of paying for calls. Because of the high cost of calls, many Africans – just like the Filipinos earlier – choose pay-as-you-go tariffs, in the form of top-up credits bought from street kiosks. Pay-as-you-go is cheaper but also, crucially, more manageable.

  A kiosk in Nairobi, advertising Celtel phone services alongside its other product lines. (Press Association)

  Another strategy to keep costs down is to share a phone. Along with the kiosks selling pre-pay vouchers, a familiar sight in contemporary African towns and cities is the brightly-coloured call box, where a local entrepreneur bulk purchases and resells time on cellular phone networks to customers, who are charged by the minute. One of the most important models was an extension of a micro-credit system that started in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank (which won its organisers the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006) provided credit and facilities for first Bangladeshis, and then Ugandan and Rwandan women to set up ‘Village Phones’. In Tanzania, a similar shared call box run by a local entrepreneur is known as Simu ya watu, which translates as the ‘People’s Phone’. The outlay is daunting, but the rewards and effects are there. ‘Mostly we have fishermen here, we have farmers and we have the business community … people from other countries and other districts,’ the local call box entrepreneur of Kigoma, Mwilima Ahmed Kalunga, told Jon Cronin of the BBC, adding ‘It cost $13,000 [from Vodacom]. But most people like to use us because they can see the minutes tick. They cannot be cheated.’ Sharing a phone can be shaped by cultural as well as economic factors. The anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith, for example, found that mobile phone credit was perceived as more akin to food and drink, which you are expected to share without incurring a debt, than to money. In this case, a new form of credit was being grafted onto existing expectations of reciprocity, gift-giving and sharing.

  Another common practice prompted by the economics of African mobiles is the widespread phenomenon of ‘flashing’. Since a call is usually not charged if the recipient does not answer, letting the phone ring once and hanging up signifies that a speaker would like a return call. The return call will, of course, be at the second person’s expense. Since most people are down on credit sometimes, the system allows the expense of calling to be shared, so long as narrow self-interest does not dominate. In Khartoum, in Sudan, tea-sellers can be summoned through this missed call system. But its application is usually broad and reciprocal. Smith, who recorded this practice in Nigeria, notes that the recipient of the flash does not always ring back. Indeed, much like voicemail, flashing provides the facility to screen as well as manage costs. In a culture, like the West but perhaps more so, where phones are status symbols and flamboyant visible phone use can be a form of conspicuous consumption, and when (and for how long) phones are used can indicate, as well as maintain, social relationships. Nevertheless, ‘flashing’ works well between peers, although Smith also occasionally witnessed a ‘comic exchange [of repeatedly flashing and flashing back] in which no one wants to bear the costs of a call’.

  The mobile phone is used in Africa in diverse ways, some of which are similar to patterns elsewhere, while some are distinctive and innovative. Inge Brinkman and her anthropological colleagues Mirjam de Bruijn and Hisham Bilal have been observing the use of mobile phones for a decade. In Khartoum, mobile phones are used to sustain both economic and social ties. Young men, having moved to the capital, keep in touch with home. Family ties are sustained by the increased contact between kin. Young women, scandalously to some in Sudan, chat about relationships with men, and vice versa. Not only businessmen but also businesswomen, significantly in an Islamic society that enforces separate spheres of activity for men and women, use their phones to keep in touch with customers. The anthropologists give the example of Fatima, a henna painter:

  All her customers reach her by phone and she used the first income she had (in 2002) to invest in a mobile phone. When asked the reason, she answered: ‘I heard the mobile phone would bring work and that was exactly what has happened.’

  In countries such as Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania farmers use their phones to access market information, such as tomato prices. Whereas previously they had been isolated and reliant on the say-so of middlemen, now they can check what a good selling price might be, and even arrange to sell direct. In South Africa, by 2005, more than eight in ten small businesses run by black people relied solely on mobile phones rather than landlines. The opportunities for entrepreneurship have been greatly extended by the spread of the mobile phone networks, not least because Africans have been able to carve out new jobs servicing them. The kiosks selling phone vouchers and the call boxes offering shared use of phones are both widespread examples. The general economic boost given by this activity has been measured. The London Business School, for example, reckoned that an increase of ten phones for every hundred Africans would boost GDP by over half a per cent. There are also suggestions, albeit slightly reminiscent of ‘Darkest Africa’ stereotypes, that the increased feelings of safety and security enabled by allowing businessmen and women to be in constant touch boosts the likelihood of trade between African hinterlands and the developed world.

  Perhaps the most spectacular, and innovative, development of mobile culture in Africa is M-PESA – ‘M’ for ‘Mobile’ and ‘pesa’ meaning ‘money’ in Swahili – a form of cash carried on a cellphone that has been immensely successful in Kenya. Mobile credit has been tr
ied in the West but it has never flourished. However, in Africa the different economic and social circumstances created a very different context, one conducive to growth. Banks might be only in large towns and cities (and they charged considerable fees), while credit was almost impossible to secure for those on the poorest incomes, and paper money, carried on the person, was vulnerable to theft. In 2004, M-PESA began as a pilot project, jointly funded by the UK Department for International Development and Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile company affiliated to Vodafone.

  Interestingly, Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, the organisers of the pilot project, conceptualised M-PESA as a microfinance loan repayment system. It was the Kenyan customers who discovered for themselves the extraordinary array of applications. The mobile wallet is therefore an African innovation. M-PESA was launched in March 2007. The set-up was simple: a Kenyan registered with a local agent on production of an ID card and then deposited some credit on their phone account. This credit could then be used to pay for anything from bills to beer. Even more importantly, money could be transferred to another person’s phone by text message. It was handy, safe, and scalable: small payments were as easy as large ones. As Safaricom’s upbeat Kenyan website advertised it:

  From the ‘mama mboga’ in a village somewhere to a business magnate closing deals in a lavish hotel in the city, M-PESA is the first thing that comes to mind when a need for a financial transaction arises. Whether it is paying bills, buying airtime or avoiding the long inconveniencing queues in banks and utility paypoints, M-PESA has the solution for you. So the next time a financial need arises, sit back, relax and bask in the peace that comes with the reassurance that you have got M-PESA.