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8 The mobility of a mobile phone: Examining ‘Swahiliness’ through an object’s biography Julia Pfaff It is not just humans that have a memory and oral history, things too can tell us something about their past and our possible future (Hetherington 2001: 40) Mobile phones and their cultural and spatial mobility Thousands of mobile phones, mobile-phone accessories, SIM cards and top-up vouchers.... In Aggrey about a hundred shops sell mobile phones and items connected to their usage and appropriation. Most of the shops, being only a few square metres, have a glass cabinet at the front displaying mobile phones, with one lying next to the other. Different brands in different rows, arranged by price or the length of time they have been on display. This road is full of mobile-phone shops offering a broad (if not complete) range of models that are available in stores all round the world today, from the latest Sony Ericsson design to the Motorola flip phone in all different colours and also some of the old and simple Nokia and Siemens phones. Looking at the collection in this small road in Kariakoo, one of the main business areas in the centre of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it is obvious that thousands of processes of acquisition and exchange are involved, stretching across space and time. As Hill (2006: 340) points out, collections ‘carry a multitude of meanings that are COULD CONNECTIVITY REPLACE MOBILITY? 135 intimately linked to the biographies of the collected objects’, hinting at the spatial and cultural dimenions of their existence. In this respect, I argue that taking a closer look at the mobile phones on display opens up a window through which to examine the spatial and cultural practices in which the objects are embedded as well as to see how mobile phones influence ‘Swahiliness’1 and vice versa. Concentrating on the object’s mobility, I explore here the ways mobile phones are being appropriated and incorporated into the lives of many Swahili and are playing an important role in contemporary trading practices. Outlining central aspects of Swahili culture and especially the crucial role of trading practices for processes of identification, I highlight the ways in which the specific connections between people and objects are vital to an understanding of socio-cultural as well as socio-spatial processes. Putting this in the context of recent debates on mobile phones in Africa as well as cultural geographic research, I introduce some conceptual and methodological ideas of object biographies and ‘follow the thing-geographies’. The chapter then returns to one of the shops in Aggrey, presenting phases in the life course of a particular mobile phone on display to explore its meanings in different relations and the ways in which it has been circulated and appropriated over the last eighteen months. In doing so, I attempt to give a muchneeded empirical impression of the varying encounters between different owners, users, traders and the mobile phone and offer insight into the ways in which its biography tells us a lot about ‘Swahiliness’ and how it is constantly being negotiated, (re)created and practised by engaging. The Swahili as merchants Although the trading history of the ‘Swahili Corridor’ and Zanzibar in particular (with its two main islands of Unguja and Pemba) is far more complex, the following briefly sketches some of the central aspects of an ideology and culture of trade. Having controlled most of the intercontinental commerce between the interior of Eastern and Southern Africa and the Gulf, the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia for more than thousand years, the Swahili have long inhabited and fashioned transnational spaces of trade (Topan 1998, Middleton 1992, Mbembe 2001, Gilbert 1999: 10). People from Zanzibar are therefore often characterized (and see themselves) as ‘a seafaring and merchant people, nurtured by contact’ and it is their engagement in commercial practices that has essentially contributed to a Swahili culture and iden1 The term ‘Swahili’ is generally used to refer to people from the East African coast who have a way of life characterized by the region’s long-standing Afro-Arabic relations and the influences of the Indian Ocean, speak Kiswahili as their vernacular language and are Muslim (see Constantin 1989, Le Guennec-Coppens 2002). However most people who come under this term would first consider themselves as a member of the city or region they originate from, for example, Waamu (a Swahili from Lamu), Wamvita (a Swahili from Mombasa), Wapemba (a Swahili from Pemba). This article concentrates...

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