two-way radio systems in Kinshasa: connecting the rural and the urban - Seminar presentation in Brussels (May 2017)

On May 9 2017, Katrien Pype presented preliminary analysis of her research on CB radio communications in Kinshasa. The presentation was part of the seminar series of the (Belgian) Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences.

Here you can find the abstract of that presentation:

Living with Interference. Ethnographic Notes on Affect in Translocal Connectivity (Kinshasa)

Mobile phone technology constitutes only one, and a fairly recent, platform for connectivity with “elsewheres”. I focus here on radio phonie communication, a technology commonly known as citizen broad band radio, that has ensured long-distance dyadic communication in DR Congo since colonial times, and doubles as a money transfer agency. Recently, this outmoded communication platform has known an upsurge in Kinshasa in order to enable connectivity with regions in the former Bandundu and Equatorial Provinces, areas without cellular coverage. First, I examine phonie connectivity, and especially the affective dimensions of this long-distance interaction and link this tot the position of Kinois as “city-dwellers” trying to cope on the one hand with the socio-economic predicaments of life in an African metropole, and with claims –interpellations- made by relatives or intimate Others residing in the hinterland. Second, I highlight a material dimension to Kinois’ connectedness in order to acknowledge the role of technology in the shaping of modern sociality. Finally, I argue that the publicness of phonie talk – usually acted out in front of other phonie clients and the phonie operator, who contribute to the conversations – offers techniques for living with the interference from the urban into the rural and vice versa. By exploring “interference” as a technical and a social experience that people – not just in Kinshasa, but anywhere, where long-distance connectivity is lived – actively manage, the paper highlights the affective dissonances associated with the reduction of spatial distance through modern communication technologies, and thus brings nuance to the narratives of hope and anticipation, especially expectations for economic and material betterment, accompanying innovation in communication and the trope of global connectedness.

The material thus offers an interesting perspective on the co-habitation of so-called "old" and "new media"; while also bringing to the fore the longue duree of electronically mediated translocal connectivities. 

Katrien is currently transforming the presentation into an academic article to be submitted to the journal of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences. 

Communicating with bofania, sitting in a phonie house in kimbanseke (kinshasa) - april 2017

new book chapter on technology and the city

I am very pleased to announce the publication of a chapter in open access. You can find the whole book via this url: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=631166

The chapter is an attempt to call for more attention to the cohabitation of techne experts in African societies. In this way, I propose an alternative interpretation of "the smart city". There is considerable attention to the continuation of the social positioning of healers, blacksmiths, media practitioners and engineer students. 

In addition, I explore the linguistic closeness of various forms of knowledge in the urban sphere and the handling of tools.

The endeavor of the whole book is to propose an Africa-centered understanding of technological innovation, going beyond the familiar tropes of appropriation and creativity. The book is the outcome of a workshop at MIT held in October 2014.

The full bibliographic reference for the book chapter is 

Pype, K. 2017. "Smartness from Below. Variations on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa." In: Mavhunga, C.C. (ed.), What do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Cambridge: MIT Press. Chapter 5: 97-115.

http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=631166

Me, My Phone and I? - guest post by Shari Thanjan

Shari Thanjan holds a BA Hons in anthropology from UCT and is a specialist in maternal and child health interventions. For the past six months she has been working as a field assistant with the MediAfrica project.

A cellphone always becomes some sort of a fictional companion in your life. It’s so easy to grow attached to material things, holding you to all your networks and traits of your personality. Your phone becomes a friend in times of need. This piece is about a heartbreaking journey between me, my phone and I. And it leads me to reflect on the research we have been doing on mobile phones and motherhood in Cape Town.

The whole debacle started when I took it to a music festival a few months back. Music festivals are always a risk for all your belongings. You can always lose your most important valuable items, which usually include a bankcard, your favourite items of clothing and of course, your cellphone. On event pages on Facebook, there are always posts of people looking for missing items after the party. Being a “joller” (in South African terms a person who goes out dancing a lot), I have mastered the art of not losing my most important belongings despite partying hard. So, off I go to a music festival with my “I’m a responsible joller who doesn’t lose her things attitude”. Putting my phone in a safe place, keeping my bags closed tightly and always on my back to avoid losing my phone. Coming home on the Friday night, I was extremely chuffed with myself for not losing anything. The next morning I went for a breakfast with my friend, happy as a hummingbird. This happiness was cut short, as my phone suddenly fell on the ground whilst getting out of the car to come home. In shock I quickly picked it up to check if the screen cracked. A sigh of relief, not one crack! Then, as I turned it on, the screen remained blank, black, dead. I immediately started thinking of things I could do to fix it, thinking maybe I could put it on the charger and then it will come back to life. My mind started racing with all sorts of silly ideas. I felt so stupid, as all my “responsible” actions, the night before, putting my phone in a safe place, keeping my bags closed tightly and always on my back to avoid losing my phone, were apparently for nothing. So, there I was in an ironic situation, annoyed with myself and the universe.

Firstly, and most importantly,the phone held the ties to my boyfriends. My one boyfriend, who is sort of an ex but still a friend ( its complicated) asked me to behave while I was at the music festival and report to him, where I was and how I was doing, as he needed to know(apparently) that I was safe. Then, a boy I had been crushing on for years, was at the festival and I had drunk-texted him at three am confessing my dear feelings and was still awaiting his response that Saturday morning, but alas, my dear phone broke .Until today, I don’t know what his reply was! I always wonder if a potential and blossoming romance was cut short, by my broken phone. Obviously, it was not meant to be, but a girl can dream sometimes.

Secondly, my broken relationship with my phone affected my friendships. Of course at a festival in a city where you have many friends, you want to meet with them for pre-festival fun. Now I could not contact any of my buddies, getting some disappointed moans from friends when I saw them later that evening.

Further, without my phone I worried about my safety, potentially getting lost, and not having the ability to contact my people, or uber home. So my whole social circle and interactions, which are particularly important in the light of a music festival weekend, was all lost within that moment of my phone breaking.

Part of going for a good party these days is capturing all of the music, videos, pictures, the venue and gorgeous selfies on your cellphone. Just for keeps or to share on Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook, to show the world what a marvellous time you had . I worked hard on the Friday night taking as many cute selfies and beautiful pictures as I could, only to have it all lost. It tried to borrow my friends phone, which is difficult as their cameras work differently and sometimes their memory gets full and stuff. Eee, I guess one should just live in the moment, right? Well, now I didn’t have a choice!

Without my phone my personal life seemed to be in shambles. But worse, my job as a research assistant was set back. All of my research participants contact details were saved on my phone as well, and now I wondered how to even get in touch with them. Believe me, some of them were hard to come by. And what about doing interviews? All my recordings of interviews were done on my phone. We had also collected something we called media diaries from participants, which is a documentary of their everyday lives recorded on their phones. Though we had wisely made backups, I could not view this material on my phone any longer. How could I do my work with no phone?

It was so heart breaking. I was so upset and there and then, with my broken phone. A material object I owned had the ability to break my heart. There wasn’t much sentiment attached to my phone as an artefact, but more emotion attached to the services it could provide me with- ranging from the camera to the social ties and work - it was all gone.

Yet, in the midst of all this agony there was a light. Through doing many interviews in poverty stricken areas in Cape Town, I soon came to realize that my agony was shallow, and honestly quite silly and I should not have been so upset. Many of the mothers we spoke to did not have smartphones, or even phones. Their reason for this was its unaffordability as the prices of data in South Africa are unaffordable to most, but also more disconcerting was: Some were afraid to be robbed, if they had a (nice) phone, and some did not have a phone because it had already been stolen. While I fret and worry about Facebook posts, many people had access to Facebook as part of a data saving network plan, whereby one couldn’t see pictures and videos, only writing. Many of our research participants hardly went on social networks. Some avoided it purposefully, to avoid all the social drama attached to networks.

The moms we worked with who did have a phone often bought a WhatsApp bundle for R12.50, which lasted them the whole month, and did not include downloading of pictures and videos. Many survived with just this as their main form of communication with partners, family and friends.  While sitting in the clinics, trying to get moms to register on MomConnect, many of the moms were not even interested in their phones, or had any idea how to use it. This happened with moms of all ages.  I had to assist most people I met with the whole procedure.

My time in the field and comparison with my own phone really made me realize, that even though statistic screams that South Africa has 100% mobile penetration, it is not even so. South Africa is a majority poor country. Yet, although there are many mobile interventions deriving from policy, pushed into South African programmes, it seems that end user was not considered, basically, the people of South Africa. In almost every interview I did, or people I met throughout fieldwork could not afford the phones imagined for the mobile interventions.

Going back to my drama, my fieldwork really showed me that a phone is not everything, and one can actually live a happy content life without it. The participants in the research showed me this, and helped me, well, get over my self and my phone.

Shari and a participant working on their phones

Permeable Boundaries – Anthropology Seminar at UCT

I think leaving the field is one of the worst parts of being an anthropologist for a living. Life as I have come to know it in the field collides with life as I used to know it at home. It is one of the big steps of data processing; transforming the lived life, shared concerns and thoughts, experiences, aesthetics and skills learned during the fieldwork from “stuff that is going on in my life” into “data”; the object of analysis and writing academic texts and the like. Suddenly everything, both “here” and “there,” is strange and awkward.

The boundaries between the field and home are in anthropology increasingly permeable, but maybe that just intensifies the movements as different modes of engagement with the world.

Me and the awesome assistant Shari felt this in full a few weeks ago, as we finished up and said goodbye to friends at Hanover Park MOU and at the courts we had been hanging out at, and then drove straight to University of Cape Town for me to present at the research seminar of the Department for Anthropology. We were late, and I was nervous and had bad stage fright.

Luckily the theme was Permeable Boundaries, and I was presenting with my buddy Rogers Tabe Egbe Orock from Wits University. We talked about the concept of “BIGNESS” and power in our fieldworks in Cameroon and Uganda, and in African anthropology more generally. But we also talked about our shared background as PhD students in Århus and the pathways of being a young(ish) scholar. The questions from students and colleagues led to important discussion about stereotypes in African politics and the materiality of fame and power.  

Letting the calmness and openness of hanging out at Hanover Park seep into the seminar room for me brought a gentleness and humor to a genre, the staff seminar, that us usually either dreary or scary.

”Hinging on the concept of permeability, we hope to preliminarily imagine and practice an intellectual collegiality that will help us grapple with some of the core issues of the current political moment. ” (from the Anthropology Seminar blurb)

The seminar also marked the end of my time at UCT as a visiting fellow, and I left Cape Town grateful for the wisdom, tough questions, and generous help and friendship from colleagues at Anthropology and the First Thousand Days research group.

PhD buddies from Århus reunited in Cape Town: Nanna and Rogers

A great opportunity to learn about development in Africa

On December the 14th 2016, from 6 PM Morten Jerven, Economist and Professor in Development Studies at NMBU (Norway) and Grieve Chelwa, Economist and Post Doctor at Center for African Studies, Harvard University will meet to discuss economists (mis)understanding of Africa's economic development and what is acutally happening on the continent.

The seminar is open and hosted by Norwegian Concil for Africa and takes place in Kulturhuset, Youngstorget 3, 0181 Oslo.

Reflections on the richness of visual data at Visual Research Coference

Helle-Valle 1990, Botswana

Storm-Mathisen and Helle-Valle gave a talk, titled Visuality re-acting  at the Thirty-Second Annual Visual Research Conference, November 14-16, 2016, Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Orgnizers and Chairs: Thomas D. Blakely, Andrea Heckman, Jerome Crowder.)

Read the abstract here.

Inspiring workshop at Center for African Studies, Harvard

Robinson Hall, Harvard

The Center for African Studies Workshop, taking place in Robinson Hall on campus and headed by Jean and John Comaroff, is a weekly event in which various scholars present work that in some way is related to Africa. This is an initiative that the Comaroffs brought with them from the University of Chicago to Harvard. It has become a hub of the Africanist melieu at Harvard, gathering both students, staff at the univerity as well as interested outsiders and visitors. In addition, the seminar is incorporated into undergraduate and graduate teaching at Department of African and African American Studies ands the papers are thoroughly discussed in classes beforehand. 

On the 26th of September 2016 Jo Helle-Valle gave a presentation, based on fieldwork over a quarter of a century in Botswana, titled "Seduced by Seduction - being a man in Botswana". (Read the abstract here.) The full paper was disseminated a week before to all members of the workshop. The workshop opened with the author presenting the paper's main argument and situating it within a wider academic landscape. Then dr. Lorena Rozzi, from Department of History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and a visiting scholar to Harvard, served as discussant before the floor was open for all.

Valuable comments will be incorporated into the reworking of the manuscript.

Beyond Free Basics: Facebook, data bundles and Zambia’s social media internet

In the final article of a series looking at the role of digital technology and social media in Zambia’s recent elections, LSE’s Wendy Willems argues that mobile data bundles are crucial to the growing power of social media platforms in Zambia, increasingly creating a ‘social media internet’. They also pose a number of political challenges to mobile operators and governments on the continent. While calling features on Facebook and WhatsApp threaten the revenue base of mobile operators, the political affordances of social media have resulted in a number of government shutdowns recently. 

Corporate social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp (and Twitter in certain countries such as Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) are fast gaining ground on the continent. The number of Facebook users in Africa was estimated at 124.6 million at the end of 2015 and continues to grow. A key driver of the growing power of social media platforms on the continent is the mobile internet. The penetration rate of mobile broadband subscriptions in Africa has increased from 1.8 per cent in 2010 to 29.3 per cent in 2016 (ITU), and the majority of African users rely on mobile internet access.

 

Mobile battery charging station in a stall in New Soweto Market, Lusaka
Photo: Wendy Willems

New market entrants such as China’s mobile messaging platform WeChat are intensifying the competitionbetween different digital platforms on the continent. Earlier this week on 30 August 2016, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg landed in Nigeria which marked his first visit to an African country. Facebook has in recent years adopted deliberate strategies to expand its reach on the continent, expressed through the company’s ‘charitable’ mission of connecting the next five billion. Facebook plans to provide African users with internet access through the solar-powered Aquila drone in the near future. In addition to this, Facebook’s Free Basics app now enables African mobile phone users in 21 African countries to access a text-based version of Facebook free of charge while Facebook Lite allows users to run the application with less consumption of mobile data.

The introduction of Free Basics in India provoked a heated debate as it was seen to violate the principle of net neutrality. Eventually, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) ruled that mobile operators cannot charge differential tariffs for data services, which prevented Facebook from introducing its free app. In the African context, Free Basics has solicited some debate but much less controversy, and so far, regulators on the African continent have not acted against Facebook. However, the political role of social media is becoming more pronounced as noticed by governments in Burundi, Chad, Congo, and Ugandaand Zimbabwe which recently ordered mobile operators to block access to social media during periods of elections or protests, frequently citing concerns over national security.

Zambia was the first African country where Facebook launched its free app in mid-2014. During my recent fieldwork with mobile internet users, Free Basics was not frequently cited as a platform that Zambians were enthusiastically embracing. Some users indicated that the app had a stigmatising effect, with its use indicating to friends that ‘you are broke’ and have no resources to purchase data. Others argued that the app did not allow much interaction as with the absence of photos, one was never quite sure what photo or video was being commented on. This supports the conclusions of a survey recently carried out by the Alliance for Affordable Internet in eight countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which found that less than four per cent of respondents were using zero-rated data services such as Free Basics.

What seems to be more crucial to social media penetration in the Zambian context is the sponsored access of social media by mobile phone operators through attractively priced prepaid ‘data bundles’. For example, Zambia’s largest mobile operator, Airtel, offers a ‘social bundle’ which allows users to access social media for an unlimited time over a certain period (e.g. a day, week or month). The company charges ZMW2 (£0.15) for a daily Facebook bundle and ZMW4 (£0.30) for a daily WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter bundle. Daily packages are popular and enable users to adjust their data spending according to their income that particular week. With a large proportion of Zambians in informal employment, earnings and incomes are often irregular and daily bundles offer a level of flexibility.

As a result of this, the nature of Zambia’s internet is largely determined by social media. SMS and email are increasingly replaced with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Many small to medium-size businesses do not have websites but market their services on easily managed Facebook pages. Given the subsidised nature of Facebook through data bundles, mobile phone users receive a warning that they will incur data charges as soon as they leave Facebook, eg in order to access a hyperlink outside the social media platform. For this reason, most Zambian online news sites post the full content of articles on their Facebook pages rather than hyperlinks to website content which will be more expensive for users to visit.

Zambia ‘social bundle’ internet users receive a warning on their mobile phone as soon as they leave Facebook
Photo: Wendy Willems

Ultimately, this creates an internet experience that largely takes place within the walls of Facebook, raising obvious questions about net neutrality. Zambia’s internet is increasingly becoming predominantly a social media internet. So far, this has not as yet provoked a major debate in Zambia but in neighbouring Zimbabwe, the Minister of Information, Communication and Technology and Courier Services recently ordered the Postal Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) to request mobile operators to suspend data bundle promotions amid protests against government as part of the #ThisFlag movement. Social media bundles, therefore, are a key instrument that both enables and disables mobile internet access. While much critical debate has so far focused on Free Basics, data bundles may be the bigger key to Facebook’s growing expansion on the African continent.

This article was first published on the Africa at LSE blog as part of a series of three articles on digital technology and elections in Zambia.

Do mobile phones set citizens free?

In postcolonial Kinshasa, citizens use mobile phones (and smartphones) are as tools to deceive the state but also to expose fraud. The Congolese government is also strongly aware of the revolutionary capacities of new media. In 2011, text messages were blocked; and in January 2015, the government shut the Internet for a few weeks, gradually opening up Internet while blocking social media platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Viber and Skype.

It is clear that political change on the continent is not only documented by citizens filming and photographing protest and abuse, but these also feed into the ways in which citizens and the state interact. One should however always be careful to situate these mass-mediated interactions within complex postcolonial histories of governance and political communication.

Read more in the blogpost on the SAPIENS website that discusses research on the embedment of mobile phones, and increasingly smartphones, in processes of political change

The blogpost is a summary of the academic article "‘[Not] talking like a Motorola’: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa" (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016, 22 (3): 633-652)

Kinshasa's elderly people dance in TV music shows to counter the negative stereotypes of "African elders"

Fieldwork on media participation among Kinshasa's elderly people has shown that they are not that invisible in the city's popular culture. Rather, TV dance shows in which elderly Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) perform cha cha cha, bolero and rumba (among others) and in which they speak about the earliest days of Kinshasa's nightlife scene are important platforms through which the elderly communicate with the city at large, and especially with the youth's popular culture.

The study shows that elderly people are not necessarily passive consumers of media content, but actually contribute to TV and radio shows as well. 

The data are discussed in the academic journal article “Dancing to the Rhythm of Leopoldville: Nostalgia, urban critique and generational difference in Kinshasa’s Music TV Shows” 

The following four blogposts provide additional ethnographic and visual material:

1. Old age - Categories

2. Dancing elders

3. Papa Wemba and the confusion of generations

4. Photographing the Bana Leo shows 

Visiting Scholar at Harvard University

The PI of the project, Prof. Jo Helle-Valle, has recently moved to Harvard University as a Visiting Scholar. The affilation will last until August 2017. Apart from working on data analysis of fieldwork material from Botswana, and manuscripts of various kinds, he will also be able to benefit from the exciting and vibrant academic mileu of Department of African and African American Studies at the African Studies Center.

Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies, is affiliated to mediafrica. Her extraordinary competence on Southern Africa, and South Africa in particular, is an invaluable asset for the project.