Texas in Africa and G. Zachary Pastal of Africa Works have a go at this Thomas Friedman column from last Sunday that I could only be bothered to call “particularly incoherent.” I did argue earlier in the week that Frieman’s larger point might be fine — that more and better cell phone and internet access would benefit much of the continent, but I agree with both Pascal and TiA about the “Dark Continent” silliness that Friedman perpetuates.
I’d even go further — there are parts of Africa where the cell phone technology is as good as or even better than in much of the United States. When I arrived in South Africa for the first time to live there in 1997 I acquired a cell phone right away in part because in most of South Africa landlines are an enormously inefficient pain in the nether regions. And at the time, the cell phone service that I received in Grahamstown, far from the country’s urban centers, was not only better but far better than what I could receive in the US. In many very real ways, the United States has been playing catch-up with South Africa on cell phone technology, and even today many, many South Africans have cell phones that can do things that my Blackberry fails or frustrates.
Friedman has a platform that most Africanists would concede a limb for, which is why this sort of thing drives so many of us crazy. Please – either stick to what you know or find out a lot more about what you don’t.