“If you feel like you need to push, then you should push” I say. And she immediately starts pushing, her sister holding her halfway up behind her. “I don’t wanna do this,” I exclaim in panic, and I get up, walking a few steps away. Like, my whole being just wants to leave the room. “I can’t do this, I don’t wanna be here! I don’t want to be a midwife!”
Read MoreI’m back in Kampala. I have been away for five years, and return now, to see people who have been my family and friends. I am of course worried; will they remember me? I better not impinge on their lives, just politely pass by. The city, however, has other plans.
Read MoreRobinson 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.
Digital technology is transforming the way in which elections are held globally, including on the African continent. With young voters comprising a substantial part of the electorate, political campaigning is increasingly shifting online. As LSE’s Wendy Willems argues in the second article of a series about the role of digital technology and social media in Zambia’s recent elections, political parties tapped into digital youth culture in a number of interesting ways.
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Two of the researchers in the MediAfrica project presented at the recent ICA Africa conference in Nairobi.
Read MoreIn 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.
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)
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:
3. Papa Wemba and the confusion of generations
4. Photographing the Bana Leo shows
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.
Arrival at a new field site is for the ethnographer often characterized by an overwhelming amount of practical activities towards answering questions like these: Where am I? Do I live here? How do I protect my body and my equipment (and in the long term my mind) from the weather/wild animals/destruction by ritual sacrifice/theft? Can I sleep safely? Do I need to get around? How do I get around? Who do I talk to? How do I address them? How do I respond without facing sanctions? What is dangerous? What is safe? What is good?
Read MoreConference partiicpation on visual methods
Read MoreWhat does medical anthropology and media anthropology have in common? Maybe it's something with communication and connections?
Read MoreInforming the public about a research project, as well as keeping interested individuals and organisations oriented about the project’s ongoing activities are the principal functions of a project home page. These are important functions but not the only uses such pages can be put to. In Mediafrica we have taken the homepage’s functionalities a couple of steps further: First, we have now used it to launch a web survey in Botswana. And we have also opened the project's Facebook page as a platform for data collection.
On February the 19th 2016 we launched – with the very good help of Niels Theissen, the project's web editor – a survey by way of the homepage and our accompanying Facebook page. Such a task is not a walk in the park and a great deal of work was put into it. For one, the technical side must be functional and reliable; we must be sure that those taking part access the questionnaire and can complete it without much ado. Moreover, as it is a survey about and for people in Botswana we needed to make sure it only reached those living in Botswana. It was also important that the questionnaire was designed and presented in ways that met sound methodological standards. And last, but not least, we needed to make the survey known and desirable to take part in. Two strategies were chosen; prizes were set up (three nice tablets) and solid PR. In addition to promoting the survey on Facebook, and making it public on the University of Botswana’s Blackboard, we chose to approach the largest privately owned radio station in Botswana, the Gabz FM. They met us with great enthusiasm. We wish to thank them for their very positive and creative response. Not only were they willing to give us airtime – on three different occactions actually – but they also gave advice to how to best promote the survey.
In addition, in order to spur the interest of possible respondents we launched 'teaserquestions' on our Facebook page every day for three weeks prior to the opening of the survey. The response to these questions have proved to be an interesting source of data for the project.
As it is now nearing its closing date (18th of March), we can surely conclude that the web survey has been a great success. A lot of work has been put into it (and some trial and error) but it now seems that we will receive more than a thousand responses. Too early, of course, to say anything about the content but we look forward in anticipation to sit down and analyse the results.
On March 8th - the international women's day - , Ardis Storm-Mathisen (Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo) and Jo Helle-Valle (Development Studies, Oslo University College) met with Jane Bennett, Head of African Gender Institute (AGI), University of Cape Town, South Africa, to present the Mediafrica project and discuss common interests.
A fruitful meeting with Associate Professor Fiona Ross, at Department of Anthropology, University of Cape Town on the 8th of March 2016. Practical and academic issues pertaining to the project were discussed.
With strong support from Gabz FM we have launched a web survey on new media and development in Botswana. All Botswana residents are invited to take part, it will be open until the 18th of March and it takes no more than 10 minutes to complete. By taking part you give your contribution to a better understanding of how new media influence the development of Botswana. In addition you might be among the three lucky winners of a Lenovo tablet (Tab 2 A7 - 10).
The winners will be drawn on air, by Petula and Gabriel!, on the 21st of March, and if possible they will call you up and congratulate you. Nice, eh?
Get started on the questionnaire today!
http://www.mediafrica.no/survey
Invite your friends to participate in the questionnaire:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1518708148424209/
A survey consisting of 200 household- and 200 individual questionnaires (stratified randomly sampled) was started late January 2016 and completed 12th of February the same year in the village of Letlhakeng (which harbours approx. 1000 households and 8000 inhabitants). A couple of hundred questions spanning from general background information to specific ownership and use of new media were presented to the selected villagers. In addition almost 900 pictures were taken of the households that consented to this. Six enumerators were recruited locally. Some with completed Form 5-education and some not so much. But all proved highly competent and made did a great job.
Thank you to all six for your splendid contributions: Mary Gobadileng, Vollie Kebainee, Boemo Keoepile, Sylvia Obakeng, Elisa Phokeng and Sedilane Segwagwa.
How do new media play a crucial role in the religious discourse and approach of emerging prophetic ministries?
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