In Lagos two decades ago, people were saving to connect. Today, most of us are trying to find ways to switch off
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In 2004, I was working on a project in the megacity of Lagos, the sprawling Nigerian conurbation that encircles a lagoon and is a swirling world of creativity, energy and disorder. It was my first visit to Africa.
I arrived with the preconceptions that there would be poverty and chaos – which there were – but it also opened my eyes to different relationships between society and communication technologies, and aspirations for a better-connected future.
The city was terribly impoverished. Informal settlements ringed two-thirds of the shoreline and life was hard for most citizens. To the south of the lagoon lies Victoria Island, an affluent enclave where private compounds and five-star hotels cater for Nigeria’s small elite and visiting international oil executives.
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I stayed on Victoria Island and travelled with my group on a minibus to business meetings throughout the city, making painfully slow progress through congested streets and over bridges that crossed polluted, brackish waters. The memory that has endured from that trip is a minor detail that speaks to a broader picture of socio-technological transformation.
The bus driver who took me around the city was a kindly man, consistently well presented in a smart shirt and chinos. On his hip was a holster that was always left empty. This black leather pouch was shaped for a Mars bar-proportioned brick phone. To my eyes, and those of the other foreigners I was working with, there was something a bit passé about a belt-worn phone case. The unused, accessory always caught the eye.
When I asked him why he never carried his phone on his hip, I expected a simple answer – maybe he kept it locked in the vehicle for safety, or removed it when driving because it sat awkwardly. It was neither of these explanations. He didn’t actually own a mobile phone. Not yet.
Our driver had bought the holster as a prelude to phone ownership. He was saving up and knew he would need somewhere safe to carry an expensive device. He also wanted to signal to people that he was going to be getting one soon. He was a man coming to the digital age. This anticipation of joining a new world of mobile teleconnectivity is part of a broader African social history of inconsistent relationships with technological progress.
The anthropologist James Ferguson wrote in his seminal Expectations of Modernity about how professional and skilled Zambian workers living in the Copperbelt in the 1960s and ’70s were part of a modern world of landline telephones and jet travel, and had realistic aspirations of new car ownership.
But when economic collapse came in the 1980s and ’90s, the phones stopped working, the airlines closed and the dreams of a car of their own faded. Poverty spread through communities that had once been comfortable by global standards. Urban middle-class Nigeria followed a similar trajectory in the late 20th century. Being disconnected from social and technological progress was a world-shattering experience for many Africans.
In the early 2000s, the bus driver was looking forward to new mobile technology and a landline wasn’t in his future. He was part of a society that was poor, but not naïve to the opportunities offered by new technologies. When I was in Lagos 21 years ago, a locally developed, nascent mobile phone banking system enabled Nigerian users to send money via text message. This was a decade before I started using a similar technology in the UK.
I have little doubt the driver would have got himself a phone shortly after I left Nigeria.
Today, smartphones are as much a part of life on the streets of Lagos as they are of London. If he’s still driving, he will be using one to help navigate the labyrinthine streets, and to play music. He’ll have access to a whole host of other local apps.
When we consider our relationships with phones, the conversation now frequently turns to wanting to disconnect. People are worried about the proliferation of attention- grabbing apps. Parents choose ‘brick phones’ for their children to avoid exposure to social media, while enabling them the security of selective connectivity. Many of us want to step back from too much screen time, while not completely switching off.
Maybe what we want now is the empty phone holster. Not literally, as a natty belt- worn accessory, but symbolically – to be able to step out confidently without a smart device as an appendage to our bodies, and to do so without throwing it away completely; to make a choice; for a phone to be part of our lives, but not ever-present.
What we can learn from Africa’s recent history is that we don’t want to be permanently disconnected, like the Nigerian and Zambian middle classes of the 1970s, to lose the benefits of technological progress altogether and suffer the shattering social consequences. Yet it’s also sometimes better to just leave the phone at home.
