“Phones mean lies”: Secrets, sexuality, and the subjectivity of mobile phones in Tanzania

Based on a year of ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and participant observation on a university campus in Tanzania, this article examines the ways access and command of mobile technologies frame understandings of reciprocal obligation and intimacy. For this population, mobile devices actually acquire qualities of “ensoulment”; that is to say that the value of the phone is elevated beyond its materiality, becoming an entity whose proximity to the bearer is necessary for contextually specific constructions of identity, personhood, and relationships. In particular, access to and possession of these mobile technologies contribute to transformed strategies of image management that prize privacy and independence. For many of these young people, actually acquiring the “right kind” of phone remains embedded in intergenerational social relationships that include access to capital, gifting, and/or transactional sex, shaping new boundaries about what is expected within families and intimate relationships. Excited by the “new social spaces” afforded by social networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Vine, students worry that mobile phones increase the possibility of sexual infidelity and introduce a new vector of surveillance into their lives.