Mobile Secrets

Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique

Julie Soleil Archambault

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226447575, 9780226447438
• eBook ISBN: 9780226447605
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. Many anticipated that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, improved access to telecommunication would enhance everything from entrepreneurialism to democratization to service delivery, ushering in socio-economic development.
 
With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance by revealing how better access to information may in fact be anything but desirable. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb, Archambault shows how, in their efforts to create fulfilling lives, young men and women rely on mobile communication not only to mitigate everyday uncertainty but also to juggle the demands of intimacy by courting, producing, and sustaining uncertainty. In their hands, the phone has become a necessary tool in a wider arsenal of pretense—a means of creating the open-endedness on which harmonious social relations depend in postwar postsocialist Mozambique. As Mobile Secrets shows, Mozambicans have harnessed the technology not only to acquire information but also to subvert regimes of truth and preserve public secrets, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.

1

The Communication Landscape

Billboards, bars, and restaurants painted in the colors of mCel and Vodacom; people texting, talking on the phone, exchanging numbers; phones cradled in brassieres and bulging out of tank tops or dangling from a cord and worn like a necklace: mobile phones have suffused the urban landscape. The new business ventures that have emerged in response to the spread of mobile phones have also transformed the look and feel of the city. Small phone-repair shops selling phone accessories have cropped up everywhere. Young men sporting the colors of either network hover around the main public areas where they sell recargas, airtime scratch cards that come in various denominations. High-profile television programs, along with concerts and other major events and national holiday celebrations, are usually sponsored by one of the two companies.1 One is constantly reminded that a mobile phone is the “must-have” object of the moment (Myerson 2001: 3), that the phone is the thing of now.

As I ponder over the statistics compiled by the International Telecommunication Union, I am acutely aware of how quickly outdated they become. The last time I checked, mobile phone penetration rate in Mozambique was nearing 70 percent.2 It is almost incredible to think that only ten years ago, little more than 3.5 percent of Mozambicans had a mobile phone. And while 70 percent is arguably a high percentage, in a country where the majority of the population resides in rural areas where limited infrastructure and severe economic constraints inhibit, or at least considerably delay, mobile phone penetration, the figure hides an important “internal digital divide,” whereby the great majority of users live either in Maputo or in provincial capitals.3 According to a survey I conducted in 2007, 71 percent of secondary school graduates in the city of Inhambane were mobile phone owners.4 During a recent visit to Inhambane, I failed to find anyone in their twenties without a phone.5

In this chapter, I situate the entry of mobile phones in Inhambane within the region’s broader communication landscape and frame the discussion around some of the practical challenges of using a mobile phone in this part of the world. I show how infrastructural limitations, an innovative industry, widespread poverty, and growing inequality have shaped the ways in which Mozambicans are able to use mobile phones and, just as importantly, the ways in which they choose to use them. The second part of the chapter contrasts mobile communication with other forms of communication, namely with greetings and the popular form of oral exchange referred to as bater papo. One of the main aims of this book is to offer an ethnography of phone use in context, and this chapter starts detailing what makes particular phone practices “Mozambican.” It will, however, become clear that what also transpires through this ethnography is a common humanity (cf. Jackson 2013: 21).

Hitches and Fixes

The spread of mobile phones has radically transformed how people in Mozambique communicate. In a country with a poorly developed landline infrastructure, mobile phones answer “a real communication need” (Hahn and Kibora 2008: 93). Like any mode of communication, however, mobile communication is not without its challenges and drawbacks. While I will explore in detail some of the moral debates around mobile phone practices in later chapters, my focus here is on the materiality of mobile communication and, more specifically, on two of the main challenges that users face, namely how to deal with the costs of mobile communication and how to address infrastructural inadequacies.

It was in 2004 that most of the people I worked with in Inhambane acquired their first mobile phone. Some recalled having gone through considerable trouble to get a phone. For instance, when Osvaldo, who was in his early twenties, moved from Zavala district to Inhambane to study, his schoolmates mocked him because he did not own a phone. Succumbing to peer pressure, Osvaldo managed to get employed in the annual mosquito-extermination scheme, but as a daytime student, he had to cancel his matriculation and apply for the night shift in another school in order to be able to work and study at the same time. Most of the money he earned went toward the purchase of his first mobile phone, while he sent the remainder of his salary to his family back home in Zavala.

If, at first, mobile phones acted as conspicuous symbols of social differentiation, as “weapons of exclusion” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 95) that visibly distinguished the “haves” from the “have-nots,” with ever increasing ownership, this fault line has waned in importance. Indeed, phone ownership has become a basic requirement for being considered a person, and with the wide availability of affordable handsets, only the most destitute find themselves excluded.6 The thriving tourism industry in the nearby coastal areas has also had an impact on handset availability. I will return to this particular feature of the political economy in chapter 3.

Many of the phones in circulation are used phones either acquired on the secondhand market, “found” on a night out, or received as a hand-me-down. In fact, “secondhand” is rarely an accurate description of the actual number of hands through which handsets have passed. Some phones have keypads with rubbed out numbers due to overuse, making texting a real trial. Batteries are commonly used well past their normal life span and, as a result, phones tend to require charging more often than newer handsets would, and for those who do not have electricity at home, recharging their phones often calls for resourcefulness. While rural residents may resort to car batteries and solar panels, these solutions are considered inappropriate in an urban context where everyone aspires to have electricity at home in the (near) future, and where acquiring an alternative source of energy would therefore only further distance them from attaining that objective. In the suburbs of Inhambane, the number of households connected to the national grid is growing thanks to the implementation of a pay-as-you-go system that renders it more affordable. Those without access to electricity at home usually recharge phones at school or at a neighbor’s house, but this involves a number of downsides, namely missed calls, the risk of handset or phone credit theft, and the shame of not having access to electricity at home.

In a phone conversation a few years ago when I was back in London, Kenneth, whom I had been struggling to get hold of, explained that he was going through hard times and that he had spent nearly a week with a flat phone battery since he had no money to top up his electricity meter. Unemployed and out of school, he had no alternative access to electricity. I wondered why he had not asked the neighbor to charge his phone, like he used to before connecting to the national grid earlier that year, but as he explained, “If you don’t have electricity at home, it’s fine to do that, but once you’re connected, it’s too embarrassing because it means you’re so broke (tchunado) that you can’t even find 5 MZN for electricity.”

Added to these challenges is the unreliability of network coverage. A young man once compared his network to thong underwear: “Now you see it,” he said, holding his phone upright to symbolize a woman and then, rotating it 180 degrees to expose her backside, he added, “now you don’t!” One afternoon, on my way to Homoine, a small town in the hinterland of Maxixe, I gave a ride to two young men who were standing in the shade of a palm tree on the side of the road. “We are going to Fanhafanha,”7 one of them said, “to inform them over there about a funeral.” He saw me looking at the phone that was dangling from a cord around his neck and, in anticipation, he added, “There is no network coverage over there.” “We left from outside Cumbana this morning,” the other one said, to emphasize the time wasted on travel. I captured another colorful image at an ancestor worship ceremony I attended in a rural district of Inhambane where there were dozens of mobile phones hanging from the branches of a large cashew tree for optimal network coverage, or “to catch network” (apagnar rede). Under what reminded me of a Christmas tree, some cooked while others enjoyed the shade and, in order to attend the beeps and rings that punctuated the drumming, one had to carefully steer clear of the fires, while remaining at the right height not to lose rede (network coverage)—precious rede!

The phone’s main affordance is as much about reaching people as it is about being reachable. In fact, the young people I worked with normally received far more calls than they made.8 The phone provides individuals with some of the advantages of a fixed location, something that can prove life-changing in contexts of migration. Given that mobiles are regularly stolen, however, this fixed location is easily void as few can afford the cost of recuperating an old number. The person living in an area with no network coverage, like the person without a phone, becomes a liability (cf. Plant 2001: 61). For those without a phone, or in between phones, phone sharing offers a temporary solution.9 Many are, however, reluctant to lend phones for reasons that will become clear in the coming chapters. Indeed, phones are usually jealously guarded as they often contain potentially compromising digital evidence of intimate, sometimes illicit, pursuits.

Prior to the arrival of mobile phones, most Mozambicans had only limited experience with telephones. When I asked how people communicated in the past, I received one of two answers: “We used to walk a lot more” or “We would write letters.” As noted earlier, mobile phones were rarely compared to fixed phones as few ever used landlines on a regular basis.10 Throughout most of the colonial period, letter writing was the only way migrant workers had to remain connected with their families. However, the popularity of this mode of communication was curbed by the high illiteracy rate that prevailed at the time. Unlike South African migrant workers who were actively involved in writing letters by the early twentieth century, it was only in the 1940s that migrants of Mozambican origin started exchanging letters (Breckenridge 2006: 151). Still, the censor working in the 1940s tellingly described letters exchanged between Mozambican migrants and their families as “written by illiterates and very difficult to read” (ibid.). Decades later, illiteracy remained extremely high: in 1960, 94.3 percent of black Mozambicans were illiterate (Cahen 2000).11

If illiteracy impeded letter writing, it also limited the uptake of text messaging. All the young people I worked with were literate and knew how to send and receive text messages, but they regularly communicated with individuals who had limited literacy skills as well as only basic knowledge of their phone’s functionalities. I often sat with Maria, a middle-aged woman, at her palm wine stall at the market. On what was a particularly slow afternoon, she asked a young man who had a used clothes stall nearby to teach her how to send a text message. Maria had been using a mobile phone for several years but, until that day, she had only ever used it to receive calls and to send liga-me messages (generic messages requesting a callback, more on which below). Amazed by how simple it was, Maria started practicing her new skill. The first SMS she sent was to her boyfriend. It read, in badly written Portuguese: “It’s me Maria, tell me something nice [bonito].” Maria then sent an SMS to her neighbor, “just to say hello.” He replied promptly, saying that he was pleased to know that she had finally learned how to send text messages.

Although people commonly compared mobile communication to letter writing, memories of actual written correspondence were often rather fuzzy—when asked to give specific examples of when they had actually exchanged letters, most had to admit that they only faintly remembered having written or received a letter once or twice in their lives—but everyone, young and old, remembered the many “wasted journeys” they had undertaken, and how they often made it to someone’s house or place of work only to find that the person in question had gone out. In fact, when rationalizing hefty mobile phone bills, people often pointed out that traveling to another city in order to talk to someone would have been far more time consuming and expensive than making a phone call.

When mCel,12 Mozambique’s state-owned and first mobile phone provider, started operating in the country in 1997, network coverage was limited to Maputo. It was only after 2000, when mCel implemented its prepaid service and expanded its network, that mobile phone use started picking up in and outside the capital. Following the Telecommunications Act of 1999, which set the stage for the deregulation process, Vodacom answered a call for tender and started operating in the country in late 2003.13 A large number of my research participants became users at a time when Vodacom had just entered the market and was offering innovative and competitive services. Vodacom conquered many for whom the 50 Meticais (MZN) mCel minimum top-up was prohibitive, by offering a 20 MZN ($1) top-up. Vodacom also appeared at a critical time when handsets were becoming increasingly available and affordable. One could buy a secondhand bottom range phone for 150 MZN ($7), approximately three days of work for an unskilled laborer. From then onward, membership rose drastically.

Today, both operators provide similar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: Living, Not Merely Surviving
• 1  The Communication Landscape
• 2  Display and Disguise
• 3  Crime and Carelessness
• 4  Love and Deceit
• 5  Sex and Money
• 6  Truth and Willful Blindness
• Conclusion: Mobile Phones and the Demands of Intimacy
• References
• Index