100  Race & Class 51(3)

‘literary text shows elements in the ethnography of the mobile margins that could be the starting point for academic research’.

That academic research provides the shifting continental focus of the eight essays that follow. Lotte Pelckmans, for example, discusses the implications of ever more popular adoption of the mobile phone for the ‘practice and production of anthropological knowledge’, based on her field work in Bamako, Mali, followed by Walter Gam Nkwi’s discussion of the call-box and the mobile phone industry in Brea, Cameroon. Like Nkwi, whose essay relates as well the colonial background to the implementation of voice communication technologies in Africa, de Bruijn and Brinkman’s discussion of the morality and socio-economic meanings of the mobile phone – particularly for women, students, businessmen, privacy issues, refugees and IDPs, and families – within the changing urban landscape of Khartoum opens with Sudan’s contested colonial history. Thomas Molony, in turn, examines the relative advantages and disadvantages of this ‘travel-saving technology’ for the market wholesaler and his rural Tanzanian producers. The contrast between face-to-face encounters and long-distance contact is further elaborated in Ludovic Kabora’s analysis of the levels of literacy and communication required and acquired in SMS and oral cultures in Burkina Faso. Similar questions of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’ are raised by Wouter van Beek regarding an indigenous healer in Cameroon and his introduction of ‘treatments by phone’ to his pharmacopoeia. ‘Follow the thing’ geographies make up the itinerary of Julia Pfaff’s ‘biography’ of but one mobile phone along the Swahili Corridor of the east coast of Africa. Finally, Jenna Burrell settles into several internet cafes in Accra, Ghana, to inquire into the other consequences of communication technologies: national development or global out-migration?

Meanwhile, back at the Grand Canari, even Dieudonné, although well-plied with bottles of King Size, is growing weary by now of the questions he is also plied with, by Dieumerci, his compatriot to be sure, but an aspiring anthropology student preparing a mini-dissertation at the local university and protégé of Professor Toubaaby (a Muzungulander), in whose employ Dieudonné carries out his daily travail, ‘for, as another saying goes, appetite grows with eating, especially for those who have made a creed of greed. Dieumerci had convinced himself that there were aspects of Dieudonné’s life he absolutely wanted to know, driven by the very same selfish academic reasons that had brought them to the Grand Canari.’ Dieudonné, however ­– who has recounted at length his origins in civil strife-torn Warzone, his years of flight and exile in Mimboland, the recent departure of his second wife Tsanga, impatient with the pleasure that her seventh husband found in the joys of the bar rather than supporting her needs and desires – must, after all, rise early to leave Swine Quarter at a proper hour in order to appear punctually for his houseboy duties at the home of the Toubaabys in Beverly Hills. Neither Dieudonné, the dispirited storyteller, nor Dieumerci, the would-be ethnographer, would seem to have acquired a mobile phone by the end of The Travail of Dieudonné, but the ‘talking drums’ at the Grand Canari, where the latter has himself become a regular denizen, continue even to the novel’s end, when ‘Dieumerci, as usual, gives him reason to keep hope alive