Making Mobiles African
Toluwalogo Odumosu · The MIT Press eBooks · 2017
Mobile telephones and Africa have become a feel-good story of sweeping technological and social transformation and of the rapid acceptance of modernity by a continent long plagued by a surfeit of bad news. This is why, for example, African journalists Tolu Ogunlesi and Stephanie Busari could write a piece for CNN entitled “Seven Ways Mobile Phones Have Changed Lives in Africa.” 1 Their narrative is simple: The mobile phone has transformed the continent. Education, health care, activism, disaster management, entertainment, banking: There seems to be no section of the African economy that has escaped the magic of the telephone. The article paints a picture of innovative solutions to specific challenges facing the continent, from countering the scourge of fake drugs in Ghana to election monitoring in Kenya using the Ushaidi platform. How did this happen, especially given the historical challenges other large technological infrastructures (such as electrical power) faced at adoption? This chapter argues that to understand the relative success of the mobile phone in Africa, we must understand the cultural and epistemic processes through which the African mobile emerges.