March 13, 2005
How mobile phones are transforming Africa
Thousands used to die because they didn't have a land line to call a doctor on, but now a cellphone explosion is making life safer and more fun. Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg reports for the Sunday Herald.
"Ten years ago there were just four million landline telephones in South Africa. It had taken the best part of a century, at a huge cost and effort, to provide them – but only 1% of black people owned phones.
Countless thousands of people died because they could not phone a doctor. Rural schools were crippled by lack of communications.
Now, 10 years after the country's first two cellular networks were switched on, 20 million people are subscribers in a population of 42 million.
The cellphone explosion is doing more to transform the “dark continent” than will any of the old ideas recycled as new in Tony Blair's Commission for Africa.
Africa has already become the first continent to have more mobile phone users than fixed-line subscribers. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) says Africa is the world's fastest growing mobile phone market.
“When cellphones were new, rich people flaunted them to show they were connected,” said Anthony Zwane, a sociologist at the University of Swaziland. “But now every bus conductor, street vendor and housemaid has a cellphone. They've become the people's way of communicating.”
-- In Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, Connie Manuel, a business consultant, said: “Traditional African culture, with its emphasis on palaver and oral story telling, boosts phone use as a means of social and family contact. By contrast, you find a more terse type of communication in the West because people don't like to ‘waste time' on the phone.”
-- In South Africa, cellphone theft rivals cellphone provision as one of the country's fastest growing industries. Last year, some 600,000 cellphones were stolen. And, because it is South Africa, where thieves are among the most violent in the world, a bullet through your head can be the price for not surrendering your mobile.
-- “In 1993 I had never seen a mobile,” said Jay Naidoo, chairman of the Johannesburg-based Development Bank of Southern Africa. “But today in Johannesburg all the pavement vegetable sellers are talking on their cellphones.
“By next year we could see a quarter of Africa's billion people using them. I am convinced mobile technology will hugely drive Africa's economic growth.”
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