‘I just called to say I love you’

Mobile phones offer economic and political opportunities to people in Africa, but they also provide a sense of belonging and self-determination. Social scientists are now analyzing how people adopt these new technologies, generating information that companies and NGOs can use, while at the same time questioning conventional concepts of development.

Sitting in a small house in Bamenda, north-west Cameroon, Mirjam de Bruijn is talking to an old woman, when suddenly a mobile phone rings. The woman’s son, who lives in the Netherlands, is just calling to say hello. ‘I will never forget the expression on her face at that moment,’ says Mirjam. ‘She literally radiated happiness, and it was then I realized that mobile phones have a huge emotional impact. They make life less hard.’

Modern communication technologies

Mirjam de Bruijn is an anthropologist and professor of African studies. Together with Inge Brinkman and Francis Nyamnjoh, she is coordinator of ‘Mobile Africa Revisited’, a joint research project involving the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group in Cameroon and other research groups across Africa. The research team, whose members include cultural anthropologists, historians and communication scientists, are studying the ways in which people in Africa use mobile phones and the internet to shape their lives. Although the uptake of modern communication technologies in Africa has exploded in recent years, little is known about their implications on the lives of ordinary people.

‘We have found ourselves in the midst of a global real-life laboratory,’ says de Bruijn. ‘Developments are moving extremely rapidly, which is why this research is so fascinating.’ Not only is the topic innovative, but so too are some of the approaches. The team uses video, for example, to stimulate discussions and to disseminate their findings to the public. Another innovative aspect of the research is that mobile phones themselves are treated as a source of information. The contact details, pictures and movies stored in mobile phones can say a lot about their owners and their social environment and relationships. Hence, the contents of a phone can reveal a great deal about the social life of its owner. The phone is literally opened – with the permission of its owner, of course – and people are asked about who they talk to and about what.

Based on a wide range of case studies, de Bruijn and her team have found that histories of mobility can help in understanding contemporary migration patterns and the ways people adopt modern forms of communication. In many remote regions mobility has long been a part of people’s way of life. Traditional hunters, for example, leave their home villages for long periods, hoping to return with a catch. The recent flows of migrants to the United States and Europe are essentially extensions of such cultures of mobility.

Today, many African migrants are part of ‘transnational families’. They live in different countries but their relations and connections allow them to ignore national localities, and their mobile phones play a crucial role in maintaining intimate relationships. These long-distance relationships are as much a part of their social life as those with people nearby. To understand social change it is therefore not enough to examine the situation in particular locations, but requires attention to their connections with people in other parts of the world. As de Bruijn puts it, ‘Mobile people live in communication, rather than in location.’

The impact of mobile phones

The Mobile Africa Revisited project runs until mid-2013, but the first findings are already emerging. They show, for example, that pastoralists in remote areas of Africa adopted mobile phones much more quickly than commonly thought. They suit their way life. Travelling long distances used to be the only way for pastoralists to communicate with people outside their own clan, but now they simply use a phone to call someone in town. Checking on the security situation, for example, has become extremely important for pastoralists in recent years, providing information that helps them to make decisions about where to take their cattle.

The researchers have also found that the introduction of mobiles and smartphones in remote regions is having a positive impact on literacy levels. Text messaging and internet access enable people to improve their reading and writing skills, and – perhaps even more important – these technologies highlight the importance of being able to read and write.

The introduction of new communication technologies has political consequences as well. A good recent example is the so-called Facebook revolution in Egypt. But the impact on a smaller scale in terms of political empowerment cannot be underestimated either. A farmer in a village can now hear about local and national political developments from relatives in other parts of the country. And smartphones allow people to access international news websites. In some communities, de Bruijn and her colleagues have even found a new type of ‘messenger’ – young people with smartphones who have become vital sources of information. They found, for example, young men in remote villages in Chad – a country in the midst of a civil war – using their phones to access an independent news website to find out whether rebel groups were heading in their direction.

The researchers have documented many more examples of the opportunities that communication technologies offer to people in remote parts of Africa. But their impact should not be measured in economic terms alone, de Bruijn warns. Using a mobile phone to call a relative abroad is usually expensive. It makes little sense from a purely economic point of view, but it makes a lot of sense from an emotional perspective. ‘Living in poverty may negatively affect your material well-being, but you may be even worse off emotionally without relationships,’ says de Bruijn. ‘Mobile phones can give people a sense of identity, and may improve their ability to shape their own lives. Imagine a girl in Sudan who manages to evade the restrictions of her family by secretly calling her boyfriend. The space to make her own choices and to express herself has grown, which increases her sense of self-determination.’

The impact of research

Mobile Africa Revisited is generating ideas that are being picked up by other people and organizations, such as development NGOs. De Bruijn: ‘In a discussion with a Dutch NGO that is working with African pastoralists we shared our findings about the opportunities that mobile phones offer to pastoralist societies, and the ways they adopt these technologies. It appeared they had never thought about that!’ Based on these discussions, the NGO has now started a new project focusing on improving the access of pastoralists to mobile telephony.

The research is also generating information that is relevant for civil society watchdogs. In Chad, for example, researchers found that the government occasionally asks the phone company to shut down the network, in order to prevent rebel groups communicating during military actions. The company obeys, because it depends on the government for its operating licence. For the same reason, the company is also said to ‘illegally’ pass on personal information about their customers to the security police. Civil society groups can use information about such questionable practices to put pressure on companies to act responsibly. In Cameroon, the researchers are now in contact with a group of lawyers who have started an initiative to address such issues.

Just like NGOs, companies are interested in the research results, and large ones like Sony-Ericsson are closely following the Mobile Africa Revisited project. So far, telephone and network providers have been particularly interested in the finding that a single phone in Africa is used much more intensively than a phone in Europe or North America. This is because African phone owners tend to lend their phones to family members and neighbours, and because many people who own a phone start small roadside businesses, where other people can make a call by paying a few coins. Researchers have labelled this the ‘single-owner, multiple-user’ principle. Mobile phone companies appear to be very pleased with this finding, as it has helped them to redefine their marketing strategies.

Capacity building is another form of impact – and an extremely important one, as the levels of education in Africa are still far below international standards. Providing high-quality education opportunities to African students has been a major objective of the project from the outset. As well as three European MA students, the project involves five African MA students, and no less than seven PhD students from South Africa, Chad, Mali, Cameroon, Angola, Sudan and Senegal. These students will take up professional positions in academia, politics, civil society or business, where they can use their acquired knowledge, skills and experience to benefit their home countries.

Immigration, integration and well-being

Mobile Africa Revisited may also provide insights that are relevant for societal debates within the Netherlands, de Bruijn suggests. As an example she cites a study that explores ways in which African immigrants in the Netherlands use modern communication technologies to maintain contact with friends and relatives back home. The study found that increased access to mobile phones, both here and back in their home countries, is resulting in a decreasing need among immigrants to get to know people in their immediate neighbourhood. This obviously presents a challenge for integration, as immigrant communities become increasingly inward-looking.

But there may be positive sides too. ‘By maintaining relationships with relatives and friends back home, people also maintain their sense of identity,’ says de Bruijn. ‘This can be crucial for immigrants to feel emotionally equipped to face the challenges of living in a new society. Such findings raise questions about what integration really means in a globalized world. Indeed, the common notion of integration may have become old-fashioned, as it is being overtaken by modern technological opportunities.’

Such insights from studies on the impact of mobile phones are challenging existing ideas about various aspects of well-being, de Bruijn believes. The findings so far suggest that the most important impact of mobile phones may very well be an emotional one. ‘This shows that while development is usually perceived in terms of access to assets, a focus on well-being would perhaps be more appropriate,’ she says. ‘It means that attention should also be paid to people’s sense of belonging, identity and emotional relations.’