The mobile phone rang for several seconds before Mary Wanjiru Kingatua answered. When she did, her reply was polite but brisk. “I’m sorry, I’m with a client. Can you call me in 15 minutes?” she said, taking time out from massaging oil into the aching muscles of one of her customers. The beneficiary of Kingatua’s kneading and squeezing could have been anyone from a high-powered client list that includes western diplomats, businessmen and Princess Caroline of Monaco. Each day, the bubbly 45-year-old masseuse drives her white Toyota through Nairobi’s chaotic, pot-holed streets, turning into tree-lined suburbs that are home to the rich and powerful. At her side are her oils and a piece of equipment that has become almost as essential - her cell phone.
All across Africa people are investing in mobiles, from slum-dwellers and shoeshine boys to nomadic tribesmen and politicians running election campaigns. A communications revolution is sweeping across the impoverished continent, now enjoying the fastest cell-phone growth in the world. In Kenya alone, mobile telephone subscriptions have risen to 4.6 million compared with fewer than 24,000 in 1999, a period when mobiles were the preserve of the wealthy elite. Many of the new subscribers could not afford a landline and lived beyond the fixed-line network, in effect cut off from the world outside their small communities.
Now, however, in towns such as Kajiado in south-western Kenya, home of the famed Maasai warriors, tribesmen draped in red robes and with swords strapped to their sides linger outside mobile phone shops. Traditionally, the Maasai walk for hours through rolling hills dotted with thorn bushes and acacia trees to contact friends or relatives. But today, more and more are making telephone calls - text messages, scratch cards for airtime and funky dial tones have become part of their everyday lives.
For businesspeople such as Kingatua the reasons behind the dramatic growth seem straightforward on a continent where landline services have been dire and expensive for decades, often the result of dilapidated state-run organisations that served as tools of patronage and cash-cows for corrupt regimes.
The new trend is the result of much-needed liberalisation that has brought private sector companies such as Vodafone, MTN and Celtel into increasingly competitive mobile markets. When Kingatua took the plunge and became self-employed in 1986 there was no option but to invest Ks7,000 (£53) - plus the ubiquitous bribe - in a landline. But at least twice a week the line would go dead and the only way to ensure that the critical link with her clients was swiftly reactivated was to pay more bribes - this time to telecom staff in the hope they would repair it immediately.
Yet she soon realised all was not what it seemed in a country where graft had become systemic under Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s autocratic former president.
“After some time I realised they were doing it on purpose,” she reflects with a laugh. “When the weekend came they would be broke and mama’s phone would go dead!” Even when it was working, life as a freelancer was far from simple. Throughout the day she would beg and borrow clients’ phones to call her house and check if there were any messages before moving on to the next job. Still, there was the risk of her turning up at a client’s home to discover that there had been a problem and the customer was no longer there - an occupational hazard in an era of poor communications. That changed in 1999 after a German customer bought the masseuse her first mobile handset. She still had to find Ks50,000 (£383) to pay for a connection as cell phones were then under the control of the state-run company - and a Ks3,000 (£23) bribe to make sure it was activated. But the benefits were immediate.
“What happened before we got mobile phones? We still survived, but how?” she says, casting her mind back to what seems like a bygone era. “Without a mobile phone I think my business would still be slow. Even if it had picked up it would have been a lot of effort. Now I have my mobile, I have my oils and I have my car. That’s it. That’s all I need.”
Yet it is only recently that mobile phones have become affordable for many in a country where more than 50 per cent of the population lives on less than $1 a day. In 1999, when mobiles were still controlled by the state monopoly, a handset and connection cost Ks200,000 (around £1,530). These days new mobiles are available for as little as Ks4,000 (£30) - reconditioned phones can cost just Ks2,500 (£19) - while prepaid services have meant users can buy airtime for just Ks100 (75p). In towns and cities, where mobiles have become trendy accessories and status symbols, cell phone shops have mushroomed along with fancy posters plastered with glamorous women and sophisticated men advertising the latest Nokia or Samsung. In rural areas, from the plains of the Great Rift Valley, through the foothills of Mount Kenya to the sleepy tropical island of Lamu, where Kingatua plies her trade for the vacationing Princess Caroline, mobile phone masts now tower above the landscape.
The result is that fixed-line subscription rates have fallen from 321,000 in 2000 to fewer than 279,000 in a country of 30 million people, while the mobile networks branch out to Kenya’s remotest corners in a bid to keep pace with demand.
Rachel Kimani is typical of the rural subscriber. A few years ago she could never have dreamt of owning a phone. Living in a sparsely furnished tin-roofed house, she has no mains electricity or piped water, just a 1 acre plot that lies at the end of a dirt track off a highway that snakes a path through the Rift Valley. Rusty guttering straddles the roof to channel rain into a circular water tank, while a small solar panel powers the few electrical goods she possesses, chief among them her Sagem mobile.
As with many African women, her daily life throws up numerous challenges: ensuring there’s enough food on the table at mealtimes, traipsing miles to markets, staying in touch with far-off relatives, communicating with a husband forced to move wherever there is work, all the while looking after children and dealing with the scourge of Aids that is ravaging Africa. Her eldest son, Paul, 23, contracted the disease after marrying a girl who was already HIV positive. After coming face-to-face with the illness she also adopted a 12-year-old orphan, David, infected with the virus. With her husband, a builder, away during week days she also tends the family’s two cows and goats, as well as beans, onions, oranges, maize and asparagus grown on their small plot.
Before, if she needed to contact her husband, relatives, doctors or teachers she would have to cram into a matatu, the erratically driven minibuses that serve as public transport, and head to wherever they were. Now if David has a problem at school, runs out of medicine or has a health scare, the teachers or doctors are just a phone call or text message away. “Everything is easier,” she says, thrusting her calloused hands in and out of soapy water while washing clothes in plastic buckets. “If I had no mobile phone, staying with David would be very difficult for me, because I might use more money and that money I don’t have.”
Listening to her talk while she works, I could see that the benefits appeared endless. Two years ago, mobiles came to the rescue as Maasai rustlers snuck up in the night to loot livestock in her area. When the raiders were spotted, neighbours telephoned each other with warnings to be vigilant and a call was put through to the local police. Some animals were stolen, but it could have been worse, she says. And having the ability to telephone traders before transporting vegetables to markets has boosted her trading power by enabling her to decide where she will receive the best prices. “Before, I took them to the market whether I had a customer or not, so it was difficult because several times I sold them for a low price. When you take them [vegetables] and they are unexpected, the customer will buy the way he or she wants,” she explains.
Hundreds of other small-scale farmers throughout the country are also tapping into the new technology by subscribing to a service set up by the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange that provides crop-growers with up-to-date commodity information. Using the fledgling initiative, farmers who were previously isolated can access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets through text messaging.
The scheme is supported by Safaricom - 40 per cent owned by the UK’s Vodafone AirTouch and Kenya’s largest mobile network - and is an example of phone providers tailoring their products to the needs of the African customer, many of whom live hand-to-mouth existences. This includes the pre-paid service, per-second billing and allowing one user to text airtime to another. Rachel Kimani’s husband, for example, sends her credit while he travels and works.
In Kenya and other African countries, services have also been set up to distribute information on health issues such as Aids via text message. In 2000, Safaricom’s target was to reach 400,000 subscribers in five years. But as it celebrates its fifth birthday it has more than 3 million. In downtown Nairobi it boasts the highest cellular traffic per square-kilometre in the world, according to Michael Joseph, the company’s chief executive. “There are many reasons why it has grown so fast in Africa, but the major reason, and this is not just Kenya, is a complete lack of an alternative means of communication,” he says. “It’s not shrewd marketing... fundamentally it’s the choice of an alternative.” He pauses, then adopts an air of wariness when asked to predict the industry’s potential growth. “All I can say to you in complete accuracy is I’m going to be wrong,” he says. “Every year, we are proved less and less inaccurate percentage-wise, but still inaccurate.”
Even in the capital’s notorious slums, where sewage runs openly down muddy pathways that thread their way through rows of tin shacks, mobiles are flourishing. Many slum-dwellers don’t have regular jobs, but even those who can’t afford the cheapest handsets can access cellular technology at phone booths that have sprung up offering calls for as little as Ks3 (2p).
For budding entrepreneurs, the booths present new business opportunities. One unlikely booth-owner is Maurice Odhiambo, a secondary-school drop-out, who left his home in western Kenya for Nairobi in search of work. Following in the footsteps of many other young Africans who leave rural areas for the city, he ended up in a slum - Kibera - where housing is basic and rents are cheap. Four years later the 26-year-old is still in the slum, but has managed to find work as a tailor and can now claim to be the proprietor of two enterprises - the tailoring business, which consists of his single pedal-powered Singer sewing machine, and a rickety phone booth staffed by his younger sister. And the phone booth business has an added attraction. Instead of frittering away spare cash he invests it in airtime for the booth, a dog-kennel-shaped wooden structure padlocked and chained to a more permanent building to discourage thieves. He says he makes 18 per cent profit on the airtime he invests in.
To Odhiambo, who has never had a bank account - or thought of having one - it is a means of saving, with the airtime taking on the form of currency while he works out how to expand. He dreams of one day employing another tailor. “I’m getting there bit by bit,” he says above the rat-tat-tat of his sewing machine perched on a sidewalk, a stream of sewage running beneath his black socks and flip-flops. “You see, if you have got a [money] generating business like that it’s better than if you are just sitting doing nothing.”
Yet while the mobile industry has so far enjoyed success on the continent, the revolution is still not complete. Network coverage is often erratic and in some areas it requires a hike up a thorny hillside to ensure a decent signal.
Another problem is keeping batteries topped up when many Africans have no access to electricity. Back in Kajiado, it’s Wednesday - market day - and Albert Mbarnoti, a 28-year-old Maasai herdsman, small-time cattle trader and proud owner of a Siemens, has walked 14km to the town for a shave and to part with Ks20 (15p) to charge his phone. He’ll then trek home. Most others in the area go through the same process. It is hardly a surprise considering that Mbarnoti’s home - typical for the region - is made of wood and corrugated iron in an area so untouched by development that the only sights are gazelle grazing alongside sheep and cattle; the only sounds the cluck of a chicken, the bark of a dog or the creaking of the compound’s gate. “That’s nothing,” he says of his trudge to town, with a bravado common among the Maasai. “Some guys can walk 100km... Before, you had to walk - you must go up to the person you wanted to see.”
Kenyans are also getting used to another aspect of mobile phone ownership - the annoying sense of intrusion that a constant communication link can bring. “I see my boyfriend sometimes switching his mobile phone off, like weekends when his friends are hunting for him, but my mobile phone never goes off,” says Kingatua, the masseuse, before recounting an example of the irritations that sometimes surface.
“The other day I think I forgot my mobile phone in my client’s living room and he [her boyfriend] called. I heard this ringing but I couldn’t leave my client and he was like, ‘I was calling your mobile, how come you are not answering?’
“I say ‘Hey, listen, I forgot it in the living room and we were in the bedroom.’ And he got worked up - ‘Why?’ And my phone is never off, and I was like, ‘Ah, don’t lose your head.’”
