Kilabuni Nights – Part VII: On Madibira’s Commerce (‘B’ – “Obama Phones.com” or “Yes We Can to Progress”

A thrilling new serial sponsored by AZAM BAKERIES.™  For the first installments, click here or check the latest copy of Boy’s Life (story name: “Tanzania!  The Three Friends”)

Perhaps Madibira’s most successful commercial venture, Obama Phones.com has brought change to Madibira; change we can believe in.

Two young men (their names elude pronunciation by our flabby Midwestern tongues) founded the company (site?) approximately one year ago.  Business has been so robust for these entrepreneurs that a short six months ago they were able to purchase a gas powered generator and sell electricity to other commercial structures in the village (Texas Chips Centre among them).  In short, they are as near a burgeoning telcom giant as a village in rural Tanzania might know.

What has bolstered Obama Phones.com’s good fortune is the blistering growth rate of the African mobile phone market.  In 1999 less than 10 percent of rural Africans lived in areas with mobile phone coverage. Today, that number is more than 60 percent.[1] To speak from the perspective of personal observation, cell phones in Tanzania demonstrate the same seeming ubiquity as in the U.S.  The service structure is a European, voucher-style one, and smart phones are rare (though not exceedingly so), but the indispensability of calling and texting as a way of life is taken as axiomatic.

In my own estimation, Tanzanians, particularly older Tanzanians, seem to have adopted the technology more adroitly and ingeniously than their American counterparts, a counterintuitive notion given historical trends and sometimes befuddling comportment in commerce observed in the country.  From a fantastic profile on the topic in the August 25, 2008 New York Times:

One woman living on the Congo River, unable even to write her last name, tells customers to call her cellphone if they want to buy the fresh fish she sells.

“She doesn’t have electricity, she can’t put the fish in the freezer,” said Mr. Nkuli of Vodacom. “So she keeps them in the river,” tethered live on a string, until a call comes in. Then she retrieves them and readies them for sale.

To see the efficiencies allowed and created through mobile phone technology is profoundly inspiring and impressive.[2] For Tanzanians in places like Madibira, the nearest commercial hub (e.g., a place where pieces of a productive business infrastructure – refrigerators, generators, buses, power tillers, etc. – can be purchased, ordered or picked up) can be a day’s travel or more away.[3] To a villager, the prospect of traveling hat in hand to a foreign town for the purpose of somehow obtaining an industrial tool and then improvising a means of transporting it the entirety of the distance homeward is a prospect so large and with so many unknowns as seem wildly implausible.  The idea as a plan of action seems like something from another world; something that may occur in South Africa, or perhaps Dar, but not “here.”

The advent of mobile phones has changed all that.  Now, these propositions can be tackled incrementally.  To call a vendor, discuss particulars, construct a logistic strategy and set a time and date for a transaction to take place – these are finite steps, comprehensible tasks to be completed in a discernible sequence to achieve a desired end.

In fairness I only spent an appreciable amount of time in a single rural village, but for all its pastoral charms Madibira also held the unmistakable buzz of a city on the make.  Plans, schemes and enterprise run through the village like a contagion, and while my perceptions are imperfect I sense that access to long-distance communication is at the root.  Conventional telephone service holds little appreciable legacy in rural Africa.  Attempts to string wire across the countryside often failed, and when they succeeded the wire was inevitably stolen by locals and used for more concretely practical purposes.  As a result, most villages have never known any type of reliable telephone service, but now they do and for the first time the larger world is, to borrow a phrase, something they can reach out and touch.  It is as though a new language, a language of opportunity, ambition and progress has been unlocked and for the first time people are seeing that not only is the arrow pointing up, but that “the arrow” is worth observing at all.

I digress, back to Obama Phones.com.  The proprietors of the store have developed a suite of services that is expanding nearly constantly.  For 1,000 Tsh, Obama Phones.com will provide your mobile phone with a full charge.  Voucher time is sold there, as well as data voucher (mobile internet – I believe Boots Himself is the only Madibira patron of this particular service ).  Recenlty, the owners of the store acquired a computer (!) for the purposes of loading songs and ringtones (scanned to the computer’s hard drive from a CD, there is no internet service in Madibira) onto customers’ phones.  At present, the shop owners are improvising a method of keeping business records, electronically.  The notion of keeping business records at all is an extremely novel one in Madibira, and to do so electronically is a departure so startling that it nearly defies description.  It would be like not just running a three-minute mile, but running a three-minute mile while traveling through time.

Obama Phones.com has also invested in a small freezer, in which anyone who wishes to chill a bottled drink (Coca-cola, Sprite, etc.) may do so for a small fee.  Also within is some type of odd runny ice-creamish thing (an AZAM BAKERIES™ product) that only Boots has held the fortitude to sample (and paid dearly for his trouble).

To rate the services of Obama Phones.com is a tricky thing.  I personally had no cause to engage their services during my weeks in village, yet the shop’s influence on the commerce of the village is irresistible.  I feel equal parts excitement, admiration and astonishment at the institutions success and potential, but at the same time I cannot fully forgive that odd, disgusting ice cream substance and the havoc it wreaked on Boots’ intestines.  4 machetes (out of 5)

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[1] “Jenny Aker and Isaac Mbiti.  “Africa Calling: Can mobile phones make a miracle?” BostonReview.net. http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/aker_mbiti.php. Quoted verbatim.

[2] In the spirit of candidness I should ad that the most popular television advertisement for mobile phones in Tanzania features a cross-country passenger bus.  The bus pulls over for the passengers to go to the bathroom and the protagonist heads off into the bushes, presumably to do a #2.  The bus leaves and the protagonist runs after the bus in a panic, pulling his pants up along the way.  Then, the light goes on and he pulls out his cell phone to summon the driver of the bus and the day is saved.

[3] In the situation of Madibira, the nearest commercial center is a place called Mafinga, one of the world’s true shitholes.  A dusty junction town, Mafinga is a charmless, formless expanse of inns (brothels) and commercial lots.  Nobody — nobody — likes it there.