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Ghana: The Wonders And Dangers of the Cell Phone

I. K. Gyasi

5 January 2009

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analysis

Electronically-better minds have written informatively about the cell phone, more popularly known here as the mobile phone.

Being 'electronically-illiterate' I confess that I have not woken up to the full possibilities of that wonderful little instrument, which fits the palm of the hand, but which practically brings the whole world to the ear of the user.

Believe it or not, my children presented me with my first handset about ten years ago. Still, it is to my eternal shame that I have steadfastly refused to go beyond such operations as making a call, receiving a call and locking up the keypad.

It is a source of amusement and wonder to my daughter who works with a cell phone company, that I want to continue to live in the communication Stone Age when walking to deliver a message, or using fire and drum signals formed the means of communication.

I have written about the communication revolution before. Even then, in spite of, or precisely because of my illiteracy, the cell phone revolution continues to fascinate me.

If you are about my age (70 years plus) and lived at my father's village of Adansi Brofoyedru, you will realise how much has been achieved in about a hundred years.

If you lived at Adansi Brofoyedru at the time, then you lived in a communication Heaven. There was a postal agency which had everything: the phone booth painted in Post Office-red on the outside and white inside, forms for postal and money orders, postage stamps, air letter cards, special envelopes for registered letters, forms for sending telegrams, ominously known as 'krataa kokoo' or the 'red letter'. The telegram invariably announced a death, sometimes cryptically disguised as 'a serious illness'.

My father, Opanin Mama Gyasi, was one of the important elders of the village. The name 'Mama' was the corrupted form of 'Mohammed'. He was also the father of my younger brothers, Kwame Gyasi, a Senior Lecturer of the University of Ghana Business School and Abraham Gyesie, a graduate pharmacist in private practice in Accra. (Never mind the 'Fantisised' spelling of the surname, he is still my younger brother.)

Opanin Mama Gyasi was a cocoa broker, first for the United Africa Company (UAC) and later for the United Ghana Farmers Council. He wrote many letters (written for him, of course, since he was not literate) and received many letters. Some of the letters he received were actually other people's letters with the familiar indication, "c/o Opanin Mama Gyasi, Cocoa Broker, Adansi Brofoyedru, Via Bekwai, Ashanti." The 'c/o' meant 'care of'.

My father died thirty years ago last week, and the Adansi Brofoyedru postal agency is no more. The only sign that the village was an important communication centre is the tall telephone booth, with the old red colour now a definite black due to the weather.

In the age of the Communication Centre, two communication centres sprang up. Today, the two appear to have been made practically redundant, by the coming of the omnipotent and omni-present cell phone.

At the moment, one cannot get the signals from every part of the village. Still, stand somewhere in the village and you can send or receive a message.

All over the country, the cell phone reigns and rules our lives, and we are in danger of having our morality ruined as well. The land or fixed line telephone has reflectively ceased to be a status symbol. It is not as dead as the mythical dodo and it may not die. But it is no longer a source of envy for the less privileged. And neighbours no longer have to reply on the uncertain charity of the big man with a telephone, for their telephone messages.

I have had occasion to describe the cell phone or mobile phone as the great social equaliser. We have moved away from the period when use of the telephone was confined to a privileged few in homes and offices.

Today, almost everybody, young and old, male or female, highly educated or downright illiterate, city dweller and rural dwellers, student or worker, employed or unemployed, all of them use the now ubiquitous cell phone.

In point of the number of functions, the fixed line is a communications dinosaur compared to the cell phone.

I have a simple, no-frills Nokia 1100 handset. Yet this handset boasts a number of menu functions. It has an alarm clock, a calculator, a stopwatch, a flashlight, games, etc.

Think of other handsets that can take photographs and also enable you to listen to the radio. The functions of the magical handset are countless. Unfortunately, the advantages of using the cell phone come with a cost.

It is so easy to fall into the temptation of lying when using the cell phone. With the cell phone you can tell your 'communicant' that you are not at home when that is not true. It is our very normal fibre that is being attacked. There is the rise of the phone thief who often attacks his victim with a weapon. It is often a brazen, daylight attack and the victim who resists can easily be injured.

The text message is damaging spelling, driving out letter writing, and taking away the warmth of verbal communication in which the two communicators heard each others' voices. The text message, with its weird spelling, is replacing this warm voice communication. Why do some people, mostly women, think that they are so wise that they will 'flash' you while they expect you to spend your credits to call them? What happened to equality of the sexes?

You must constantly charge and recharge the battery of your cell phone. There can be a problem where there is no electricity.

I have a relative who has to go to the next village, where there is electricity, in order to charge her phone battery. Recharging your credit is another bother. You speak for a few minutes, and you discover that a large chunk of your credit is gone.

In spite of the welcome competition, there are still serious cases of inefficiency in the operations of the providers. There are frequent breaks in transmission in the middle of a conversation. Even when the person you were speaking to was standing right beside you, what you sometimes hear is, "The so-and-so person is out of the coverage area, or the number cannot be reached."

Yet these companies find a lot of money to create the impression that they are aware of their social responsibilities. Why do they so shockingly fail their customers so much?

For all the disadvantages and other problems, it is clear that the cell phone has come to stay. It is impossible to think of going back to the era when the cell phone did not exist.

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