Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how key strategies and techniques of the different parties function on a national level to respond to the need, shared by all categories of the African population, to communicate at a distance and how these strategies form a real "ecosystem"

Paper long abstract:

The expansion of mobile telephony in Africa thus remains an essentially urban phenomenon. To understand the hyper presence of mobile telephony in African cities and to grasp the eminently political dimension of networks and of their social construction and uses, my analysis is based on the "games of actors." The paper explores how key strategies and techniques of the different parties function on a national level to respond to the need, shared by all categories of the African population, to communicate at a distance and how these strategies form a real "ecosystem". We will examine how these processes overlap within the "urban fabric". One of the essential hypotheses is that, with regard to the specificities of countries in the Global South, the question of communication networks and technologies must be situated within a global context of a "paradoxical invention of modernity" (Bayart, 1994) linked to the importance of the informal economy. The adoption of mobile telephony in Africa shows that innovation is born as much from the local practices of users and small private service providers as in laboratories. This illustrates the process of "innovations by use" (Cardon, 2005) and the creative capacity "of the art of practice"displayed by ordinary people (de Certeau, 1980).