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.
