By: Trisha Phippard

I am sitting cross-legged on the cool floor of a large circular mud hut, nestled in the rolling hills of eastern KwaZulu-Natal, one of South Africa’s poorest and most rural provinces. Many members of this Zulu community – mostly women and their young children – have gathered here for a twice-weekly ceremony to consult the ancestral spirits for healing and guidance.

Clad in brightly-coloured traditional clothing and decorative beads, the community’s Sangoma (a traditional healer and practitioner of herbal medicine and divination in many Southern African societies) leads the ceremony, while other women sing and beat drums. Six younger women, training to become Sangomas themselves, are chanting and writhing on the floor as they too become filled with the spirits.

I am one of two non-Zulu invited guests to this occasion, and we sit in rapt attention, watching with fascination as offerings of soda, beer, vodka and a questionably-cooked goat are passed around for everyone to share. This is nothing like any religious ceremony I have attended before. My bewilderment only increases, however, when the Sangoma pulls a cellular phone out of her robes and begins text messaging. This sharp juxtaposition of tradition and modernity confounds and amazes me, and becomes etched in my mind as a defining moment in my experience of Africa.

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South Africa is – perhaps more than anywhere else in the world – a lesson in contrast. It is nicknamed “the world in one country” and both culturally and geographically, it lives up to the name. With eleven official languages and even more distinct cultural groups, and a landscape marked by oceans and mountains, expansive deserts and lush forests, rural villages and metropolitan cities, it confronts visitors like myself with daily examples of acute contrast and astounding diversity.

Perhaps the most brazen example of this contrast is the unmistakable distinction between poverty and wealth, and no where is this more sharply defined and exuberantly displayed than in the Western Cape, the province I currently call home. Multi-million rand homes perch on stunning cliffs at the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by palm-dotted boulevards and pristine white beaches. Just down the road – sometimes hardly out of sight – a mess of crisscrossing electrical wires over a sea of tin-roofed shacks hints at the incomprehensible poverty of the townships and informal settlements.

Four months into my second stint of living and working in Cape Town, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to attempt to come to terms with these contrasts, and try to understand the ways in which they frame my experience as a foreigner in this fascinatingly complex South African society. On the surface, it seems easy to forget that this is the poorest continent in the world, depicted so repeatedly in the west as irreversibly plagued by conflict, disease, underdevelopment and political instability. Surrounded by the glamour of the beaches, the tranquility of the winelands, or the endless supply of beautiful shopping malls, it is easy to fool oneself into thinking Cape Town is a posh European city in a most stunning natural environment. It is easy enough to turn a blind eye to the heartbreaks of poverty or AIDS and the frightening undercurrents of crime and political tension.

But we are, after all, living in Africa, and as much as it seems like it could be somewhere else, it is a world away from Europe or North America. Even in the protective bubble of a city like Cape Town, it is a different culture – a different way of life. While the more slap-in-the-face contrasts are no doubt eye-opening and important elements of my experience, what I have actually found to be most surprising and truly fascinating about life in this country are the subtler cultural differences between life in Canada and South Africa.

Reflecting on these finer cultural nuances, one unexpected difference I’ve been confronted with is the shape of the communications landscape – the simultaneous irrelevancy of the Internet, and ubiquity and influence of mobile phones.

Even in a major city like Cape Town, equipped with all of the basic infrastructure I am used to, the Internet is not nearly as much a part of daily life as it is at home. It exists, and many people have access, but even in the workplace, its role remains marginal. Face-to-face and telephonic communication still dominates, and sometimes it seems like sending an email is equivalent to doing nothing at all. It could be argued that this is partly due to the slower connection speeds and the high costs still associated with access, but mostly it seems the Internet simply doesn’t occupy that much real estate in the South African cultural domain.  

Without a doubt, my online experience in Cape Town is starkly different from my Canadian experience of talking to my flat mate in the next room on MSN messenger, arranging weekend outings on Facebook, relying heavily on email communication at work, or instantly locating any minute piece of information my heart desires with just the click of a mouse.

Consideration of the reality in more rural and isolated regions of this country – and indeed, continent – begs the question: will the Internet ever occupy the same cultural significance here that it does at home? Or will it, perhaps, be surpassed altogether by the rapid spread of (increasingly multi-functional) mobile phones? Many African citizens lack access to electricity, let alone computer or internet facilities, the disposable income to afford Internet use, or the literacy and computer skills required to be able to truly exploit its information and communication potential.

These same citizens do, however, more frequently have access to cell phones. According to a 2008 report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Africa has the world’s highest annual mobile growth rate, and had reached 250 million mobile subscribers by early this year, equivalent to a penetration rate of almost one third of the entire population. The publication Cellular News announced in October that South Africa, with one of the continent’s highest rates of cell phone use, had exceeded 43 million mobile phone customers, equivalent to an astounding 98.5% penetration rate.

By comparison, the ITU reported that just over ten percent of South Africans were using the Internet. In Africa as a whole, only five percent of the population had Internet access, over half of whom were located in North and South Africa. On the rest of the continent, only three out of every hundred people were online. The disparity is undeniable. And in discourses surrounding use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to promote development, the rapid growth of mobile phone use on this continent – increasingly to unanticipated and innovative ends – demands considerable reflection and re-examination of ICT project and funding priorities.

In my work with the Journalism Department at CPUT, I have attended several conferences and workshops – including Highway Africa, a gathering of 700 journalists, NGOs and academics from around the globe – where I had the opportunity to engage in debates surrounding the implications of mobile phones for both the practice of journalism specifically, and development and social change writ large.

Like many credit the Internet, cellular phones, too, have empowered regular citizens to join the media conversation, becoming “citizen journalists” and telling the stories they see going on around them. Initiatives like Voices of Africa (voicesofafrica.africanews.com), for example, are pioneering a new type of citizen journalism – dubbed “mobile reporting” – in which citizen correspondents across the continent file news articles, pictures, and videos using only their (albeit, technologically sophisticated) mobile phones.

Traditional media organizations are being forced to respond to this mobile influence, and are already integrating cellular technology into their media platforms, asking for feedback to newspaper articles by text message or even delivering the news itself via SMS. And these new patterns of accessing information are already catching on – a Zimbabwean woman I know who lives and works a remote lodge in the Drakensberg Mountains receives all her news directly to her cell phone.

With regards to development work, a plethora of recent initiatives on this continent feature innovative uses of mobile technology, not to mention the growth of community-based “public phone” facilities which are springing up in many rural areas, presenting new opportunities for income generation and enhancing communications abilities of previously isolated communities.

One such initiative, entitled Project Masiluleke, seeks to combat South Africa’s HIV epidemic using the country’s MTN cellular provider. The BBC recently reported that beginning in December, this project will send one million free text messages every day encouraging recipients to get counseling, testing and treatment for HIV. These texts will be included at the bottom of “Please Call Me” messages, a popular service allowing customers with without any credit to send a free SMS requesting a friend to call them. Pilot projects have already proved successful in multiplying calls to a counseling centre in Johannesburg.

Another initiative uses MXit, a mobile instant messaging platform, to provide drug counseling and empowerment to troubled members of Western Cape communities plagued by poverty, unemployment, violence and gangsterism. These are just two examples, but they are illustrative of the kinds of potential many people see in a Mobile Africa.

Mobile technology is also working its way into African politics, both officially, and as a powerful vehicle for spreading news and information, not as easily controlled or censored as the traditional print and broadcast media institutions. With voter registration currently underway in this country, in preparation for a crucial election in early 2009, South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission has introduced a cellular service for voters to check their registration status via SMS.  As election fever begins to grow, propelled by the excitement of the recent removal of President Thabo Mbeki from office and the creation of a breakaway party from the ANC (the political party which has held power since the election of Nelson Mandela), one can only speculate the role cellular communication may play as a tool for political activism and voter mobilization in the lead-up to this election.

Mobile technology is, of course, being used with remarkable creativity, innovation and diversity all over the world. In the African context, though, where the internet remains largely irrelevant and cell phone penetration is growing faster than anyone has predicted, it will be incredibly interesting to watch the impacts on this communications landscape in the coming years.

What will cell phones mean for African media and journalism? Will they allow for the telling of stories from historically marginalized African perspectives? How will they impact development priorities and ICT initiatives? What role will they play in political processes and activism? In turn, how will African governments respond to these powerful communications tools? And what kinds of new opportunities will arise through convergence with the Internet, as costs of getting online via mobile technologies become more and more affordable? The possibilities are endless.

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