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Cell phones are changing Africans' relationships with one another
This is such a fascinating and well researched article on Africa and cell phones written by James Hall for Inter Press Service. Once considered a rarity and symbol of wealth, now with street vendors and bus drivers owning them, the rich want to show they are disconnected so cell phones are now banned from country clubs and up-scale restaurants. Another sociologists observes "that cell phone has brought the past into the future by reinforcing Africans' oral traditions". Nigeria for instance, has an incredibly high level of minutes of use, with an average cell phone used for 200 minutes per week, compared to 154 minutes per week in France, 149 minutes in Japan, 120 in Britain, and 88 in Germany. "Traditional African culture, with its emphasis on palaver and oral story telling, boosts phone use as a means of social and family contact. In contrast, you find a more terse type of communication in the West because people don't like to 'waste time' on the phone". The cell phone has also become a device for socialisation, illustrated by a phenomenon called SOMU, meaning ”single-owner-multi-user". "People give the number of a friend's cell phone to other friends, and they leave messages with him. The friend becomes a communications centre. There is only one cell phone, but many people use it. This has led to entrepreneurship. People will invest in a cell phone, and they charge other people to use it." |
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