This article was downloaded by: [University of Cape Town Libraries] On: 30 May 2012, At: 07:12 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK African Identities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafi20 Pliz cal me: a fictional essay on cellffairs in cellfares Robert Muponde a a Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Available online: 01 Mar 2012 To cite this article: Robert Muponde (2012): Pliz cal me: a fictional essay on cellffairs in cellfares, African Identities, 10:2, 155-167 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2012.657833 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Pliz cal me: a fictional essay on cellffairs in cellfares Robert Muponde* Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (Received 7 September 2011 final version received 17 February 2012) Through the genre of fictional essay, ideas to do with the personal experiencing of mobile telephony in specific situations and contexts in Africa are explored. The essay uses the trope of the much used ‘please call me’ facility as a way into a discussion of the weaponisation of calls and text messages, and the creativity around countering and subverting what should be considered the violence of mobile telephony. Beyond personal traumas associated with receiving and making calls, or texting, the essay points to the instrumentalisation of the sim card in one example of personal self- capitalisation and innovation. Above all, it is about what individuals do with mobile telephony, and how they tailor uses to needs, and needs to uses. The context in which the fictionalisation is situated is a time of rapid and traumatic change in Zimbabwe, and the specificity of particular responses to a life with mobile telephony. The neologisms cellffair and cellfare are apt characterisations of these responses to mobility. Keywords: fictional essay weaponisation of calls and text messages instrumentalisation of the sim card Zimbabwe trauma please call me detritus of mobility violence of mobile telephony ‘The shrill ringing of a phone is a forceful event’ – Christian Licoppe (2008, p. 139) It was going to be the last call. He reckoned. There has to be a last call. In-between calls, whether the first ones or the last ones, there is a life. A life on coals. Of calls. The call became a duty. The thing to die of. The one thing he escaped, bodily. He still hears the call. Please call me. The number: 078 4774 something. It spoke to him, whispered to him, caressed him, tickle-tortured him, propelled him in all sorts of directions, at all sorts of velocities. Until the night he heard the crash-smash of a cell phone handset hurled against a stony wall. And he tumbled out of his hiding place in the bathroom with a swollen eye, and a cut on the cheekbone, Fanny’s broken and bloodied little finger beckoning him to ‘come out and fight’. It was the number with that ringtone, that made him nervous, and curl in trepidation, whenever he saw it, in fact heard it, in his beaten afterlife. He now wondered what the afterlife of a number looked like, felt like, after its user was dead or disconnected. Whose life, whose character, whose spirit does it reincarnate and inhabit? Get a life, some say after a hurtful experience, and move on to some place, to some relationship. Do numbers move on, die, sag or explode in the vast anonymity of unallocated, unpersonalised, uninstitutionalised integers? And regain integrity without their humanly users and abusers? 078 4774 something. ISSN 1472-5843 print/ISSN 1472-5851 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2012.657833 http://www.tandfonline.com *Email: Robert.Muponde@wits.ac.za African Identities Vol. 10, No. 2, May 2012, 155–167