Africa reinvented the phone call

The call you are not meant to answer

In much of Africa, a phone that rings once and stops is not a mistake. It is a message. The practice is called flashing in Nigeria and Ghana and beeping in Kenya and elsewhere, and researchers who studied it in the 2000s found it was used everywhere, with a shared, unwritten grammar.

It grew out of prepaid credit: when every minute is paid for in advance, a free signal is worth a lot. The etiquette that developed around it, about who is expected to call back and who is not, is a small window into how relationships work, and the habit has survived into the age of cheap data and voice notes.

Money by text message

In 2007 Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Kenya, a service for sending money by text message from one basic phone to another. It spread with astonishing speed, and mobile money is now ordinary across East Africa and well beyond: rent, school fees and a taxi ride paid from a phone, often one without a smartphone's screen. When the phone is your bank, your radio and your post office, it is not surprising that talking on it comes naturally too.

Two thousand languages, a few that connect them

Roughly a third of the world's languages are spoken in Africa. Most people grow up speaking several, and the languages that carry conversation between groups matter as much as the ones spoken at home.

Swahili is the great connector of East Africa. It is a first language for comparatively few people and a second language for tens of millions more in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and beyond, and it is one of the official languages of the East African Community. UNESCO marks 7 July as World Kiswahili Language Day. In West Africa, Nigerian Pidgin plays a similar role: estimates of its speakers run to tens of millions, the BBC has broadcast in it since 2017, and it is the easiest way to talk to almost anyone in Lagos, whatever their first language. "How far?" is a greeting, and the right answer is usually "I dey".

South Africa shows the same variety from another angle. It has twelve official languages since South African Sign Language was added in 2023, and a single conversation in Johannesburg can move between English, isiZulu and Afrikaans without anyone remarking on it.

The youngest continent

A young population is a talkative one online. And because the continent stretches north to south rather than east to west, most of its big cities share one evening. When it is nine in Lagos it is eleven in Nairobi, and almost none of these countries change their clocks for summer.

The same moment, p.m., in four cities. No daylight saving in any of them.

Greetings deserve their own note. In many African cultures, launching straight into business without asking after someone's health, family and day is rude, not efficient. If a conversation starts with several rounds of "how are you" before anything else, that is the conversation working as intended.

So when you meet someone from Accra or Nairobi, try asking the obvious question nobody asks: do you still flash people?