Paper short abstract:

The mobile phone in Africa is widely regarded as having a revolutionary impact and contributing to positive social change. This paper critically reviews the relations between media and social change on the African continent, more specifically in relation to mobile communities, on a more empirical basis.

Paper long abstract:

Since the beginning of this century African societies, both urban and rural, have become connected through mobile technology. This so-called mobile phone revolution has been hailed for its enormous impact on positive social change. In this paper we will present results from a research programme that started in 2008 investigating the relation between mobile technology and changes in the political and social landscape in Africa. We concentrate on the comparison of various mobile communities (i.e. refugees, migrants, internally displaced people) in Central and Southern Africa. In the programme we have worked with concepts like mediatisation, intertextuality of media and 'appropriation' understood in a historical and comparative perspective. This paper will first of all present the empirical results of the project within relation to case studies of mobile communities from Cameroon, Chad, Angola and Namibia. These results will be situated in the overall discussion on the relation between mobile technology and social change as it is discussed for the African continent that still lacks a firm empirical grounding. Subsequently the paper will review its analytical conceptsmodel in relation to its findings and to the explanation of mediated change in Africa's mobile communities. The paper draws from the results of the project 'Mobile Africa Revisited', based at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands (www.mobileafricarevisited.wordpress.com )