Waithood, Music, Fakes, and Well-Being: Exploring the Mobile Lives of South African Township Youth Through the Mobile Diary Method

Abstract

South Africans enjoy increasing access to digital connectivity. But little is known about the roles that mobile phones play in the everyday lives of young South Africans who live in marginalized spaces. Responding to this gap in the literature, we conducted research with a naturally occurring group of sixteen young adults, between the ages of 18 and 34, living in an under-resourced Eastern Cape township. Using the mobile diary method, we asked these young people how they use their mobiles as part of everyday sociality and to support their well-being. The article (1) reflects on the efficacy of the mobile diary method as a means of understanding our respondents’ lives and worlds; and (2) presents four themes emerging from the data generated by this method: “waithood”, “music”, “fakes”, and “wellbeing”. We conclude that the mobile diary method generates rewardingly rich data that reveal the complexity of township digitality and sociality. This texture avoids simplistic binaries and does justice to the experiences of young people in marginalized contexts.

1. Introduction

The relationship between young people, their social worlds, digital devices, and media has become a focus of sustained and keen research interest in the developed democracies of the northern hemisphere. Extensive northern scholarship explores the novel ways in which youth put their digital connectivity to use and to understand the consequences this use has for social, cultural, and economic belonging, political participation, and personal development. Such questions are also important in what Selmah Lawrence (2022) terms the “Majority World”—where most of the population is young and where the digital landscape—like the social and political landscape in which it is embedded—is unequal and fragmented. Yet, in contrast to the rich scholarship of the north, there is insufficient evidence or theorization about this relationship from the global south, a term we use to describe spaces like South Africa, which, often previously colonized, remain at the margins of global technical and economic development, political influence, and knowledge production (Cooper, 2021). Spurred by our interest in these questions, we worked with a small group of sixteen young people from Makhanda, a small provincial town with about 98,000 residents in the Eastern Cape, the poorest of South Africa’s nine provinces. Our aim was to try to understand the everyday “socialities” in which the mobile phone is embedded. We were curious about how and why mobiles “matter” to our participants, how mobiles help to connect them with family, friends, and work, and how they might promote personal well-being. In order to develop a detailed picture of the roles that the mobile plays in their social lives, we decided to use a novel method of data collection, the mobile diary method. This article reflects on the efficacy of this method and sets out some of the findings that emerged from the research.

1.1. Context

While the choice of Makhanda as the location for the research is largely pragmatic, the result of proximity—our university is located there—its selection is also useful as a case study. It is an apposite example of South Africa’s broad social geography, which has been shaped by the oppressions and injustices of colonialism and apartheid, as well as the political and economic strictures of post-apartheid neoliberal governance. Makhanda West, the city center, which began as a British military garrison, has a cathedral, high street shops, private schools, law courts, a police station, a hospital, and a university. The white inheritors of this historical advantage live in neat suburbs and enjoy some municipal services. They comprise about 11.3% of the municipality’s total population of 97,815 people (STATSSA, 2022). Makhanda East, in contrast, is a township or “location”, situated some kilometers away from the city center. Townships are peri-urban residential areas, originally set aside for Black working-class South Africans in the twentieth century (Freund, 2007). Its residents form the majority—73.9%—of the wider municipality’s population. Many live in basic state-provided housing; there are also several extensive informal settlements, comprised of unserviced shacks; and while it has schools and some primary healthcare clinics, it has no formal shopping centers. Many roads remain unpaved and deeply potholed, and municipal services, such as water provision and refuse removal, are intermittent. These historical social inequalities shape the lived context in which young people use their devices and make sense of the media they consume and create. They are also, ultimately, the source of the digital divide that characterizes our southern locale.

1.2. Digital Inequalities

Africa lags behind the developed democracies of the West in terms of its media infrastructures (Mutsvairo & Ragnedda, 2019), but South Africa enjoys one of the highest Internet and digital media penetration rates on the continent, with an internet penetration of 72.3% in January 2023 (Cowling, 2024; DataReportal, 2023). Following this trend, digital technologies such as mobile phones, mobile internet, and social media have become an essential part of many young people’s lives for relaxation, socialization, and education. However, South Africans suffer from a marked digital divide, for digital infrastructures and access to devices and data are highly unevenly distributed (Shanahan & Bahia, 2024): patchy access to infrastructure, weak or intermittent digital and electrical connectivity, and the high cost of data and devices relative to income constrain how young people are able to use and benefit from the digital domain. Ironically, while many South Africans remain unconnected, those with internet access may have more than one mobile device and can spend over 10 h a day online—more than anywhere else in the world.

1.3. SA Youth and Mobile

The impact of the rapidly expanding digital landscape on various aspects of social life in Africa is attracting scholarly interest, and there have been moves to shift the research focus from the simplistic and deterministic approach of early studies of the use and impacts of ICTs on the continent. It is recognized that a more contextualized understanding is needed of the heterogeneous ways in which people experience digital media technologies, one that takes into consideration the way digital devices and media participate in and shape every aspect of daily life both at the micro and hyperlocal level (Wasserman, 2018). However, much of the literature on mobiles focuses on “developmental” topics, such as education, health, and mobility. In contrast, research with a sociological or cultural focus appears to concentrate on mobile apps, such as MXit (Schoon & Strelitz, 2016), Facebook, and Tinder (Bosch, 2020). Our paper addresses this gap in understanding by looking at the everyday use of the mobile phone by young South Africans in contexts of relative disadvantage.

2. Materials and Methods

In this paper we attempt to answer the following research questions:

• How does the mobile diary method enable young people to speak about their everyday digital practices and socialities?
• In what ways do young people use their devices to support their social and personal well-being?

To answer these questions, we decided to use a purposive, non-probability sample (Babbie, 2017) and worked closely with a small, naturally occurring group of sixteen young post-matric adults between the ages of 19 and 34 (ten males, five females, and one non-binary). They share a similar background, insofar as they all live within the same geographical, infrastructural, social, and economic constraints of Makhanda East. At the time of the research, they were all attached to the Joza Youth Hub, a local NGO in Joza (a mixed residential and business area in the township). There they received a small monthly stipend as ‘Interns’ in the “Talking Technology To Power (TTTP)” project, funded by a local NGO, the Village Scribe Association1. This project tasked them with investigating the status of digital infrastructure in the city’s schools and libraries. They all described this internship as “work”, although it was not contractual. Thus, when we began our research with the interns, the project had already introduced them to the concept of digital inequalities, and they had a lively idea of how differences in access reflected the geography of spatial apartheid in the different sectors of town. Through their work as TTTP interns, they occupied a privileged position relative to their peers within Makhanda East, not only due to the stipend (an important distinction, given the more than 50% local youth unemployment rate) but also due to their ongoing access to the Hub and its (modest and somewhat worn) facilities, which include a seminar room, a small computer lab, and, most importantly, Wi-Fi. The Hub thus lives up to its name by connecting these young people as a group via its organized activities, but perhaps more importantly, by providing a safe space where they can hang out and connect to the Wi-Fi with their mobile phones.

A second commonality, which also explains why Wi-Fi access is so important, is that many of the interns were pursuing educational qualifications. All had matriculated (the South African school-leaver’s certificate) from one of the local township schools, which still struggle to overcome the legacy of apartheid education and are severely under-resourced. Many pupils of township schools may pass Matric but not achieve a “Bachelor pass”, which would enable them to apply to university (Wills et al., 2024). For this reason, those who wish to enroll in a degree are compelled to improve their matric marks and so sign up for classes run by local NGOs. A few have already acquired a tertiary qualification; others are attempting to complete a diploma at the local technical college. Wi-Fi and a mobile with some storage capacity become essential in this endeavor.

We use two complementary methods in this research to capture and analyze the data: the mobile diary to collect data and narrative analysis to interpret the interviews based on the diary entries. The mobile diary method, a qualitative method used within mobile research, underpins the focus of this article. As a method that foregrounds the participants’ understandings and experiences, it has shown promise as a means of uncovering the nuances of mobile phone domestication in southern spaces and is thus considered a decolonial research method (De Lanerolle et al., 2020). To implement this method, we met with the respondents as a group and explained what it entailed. We then asked each one to create a written narrative of their activities on the forthcoming weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). On each of these days, the participants filled out a diary (on paper, by hand) in which they recorded in detail what they did with their mobile and other digital devices, along with all the social and domestic activities they took part in. The following week, each participant took part in an individual interview with one of the researchers, based on their diary entry. The interviews took place on campus in a familiar venue and were recorded using digital voice recorders. The researcher asked the interviewee to elaborate on their diary, following up with questions and eliciting the lived and emotional context of their device’s use.

The aim of the mobile diary method is to capture the mobile (and other digital) practices that form part of everyday activities. This “media practice” (Couldry, 2004) approach, in which we take a moment to listen in to the “long conversation” (Silverstone et al., 1991) in which the mobile is embedded as a constituent part, proposes that media acquire significance through the meanings associated with everyday life. The focus on the details of everyday life allows us to actively resist the stereotypes of victimhood associated with marginalized Black South Africans and instead focus on their agency (Ndebele, 1986). It also enables us to gather data that describes mobile practices that might be overlooked in an interview due to their intangible or transient nature (De Lanerolle et al., 2020; Sinanan et al., 2018). The nuanced understandings that emerge from this process go beyond a binary approach to connectivity and assist us in understanding how the mobile phone is made meaningful within the network access and exclusion experiences among the “less connected”.

Our approach is informed by de Sousa Santos’ (2014) Epistemologies of the South and foregrounds African ways of knowing and being. We argue that African ways of being and knowing offer alternative epistemologies that valorize the multiplicity of experiences in our southern space, one that is simultaneously resource-constrained and technologically saturated. In keeping with this aim and in order to connect the content of the diary and the personal reflections and explanations revealed in the interviews, we chose narrative analysis as an analytic method. Narrative analysis enables us to construct and present select individuals’ experiences as complex stories (Esin et al., 2014). These narratives are not conveyed as such by our respondents, at least not in the composite form we present in the findings. Rather, they are a way for us to shape and give meaning to the disparate events which they describe in the diary and elaborate on in the interview. This method allows us to capture the “small stories” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008), elicited by the mobile diary and the interview, about mobiles and daily life in the township and to present these in such a way as to convey a coherent sense of our respondents’ lifeworlds. In doing so, we are not attempting to impose on the respondent the “truth” about that person’s experiences; rather, we pay attention to and try to reconcile the complexity of the interview and diary data, the participant’s own meanings, the meanings that the researcher and participants co-construct, as well as the complex layers of power relations that characterize the social spaces in which we live (Esin et al., 2014). As far as possible, we attempt to be faithful to the individual’s sense of self as communicated through the diary and interviews, as well as what we came to understand about them personally over the research period. We present these narratives under the four themes that comprise the findings.

3. Results

The mobile diary method exceeded our expectations, generating surprisingly rich and detailed data. This may be due to the way that it enabled our participants to capture the tacit and habitual routines and activities that create the texture of domestic, social, and work experiences—things that would otherwise stay hidden and unremarked on in a conventional interview because, on the surface, they seem banal and unremarkable. The focus on a single working day, as well as a weekend, meant that participants captured a wide range of activities, including work, domestic, and broader social contexts.

The following themes emerged inductively from a close reading of the mobile diary and mobile diary interview transcriptions (Babbie, 2017). While they are not exhaustive, they are indicative of the interns’ shared positionality within the township space, both geographically and socially. Importantly, while we have separated these themes for analytic purposes, it will become clear that, as categories that attempt to capture certain facets of social experience, they are closely interconnected and draw meaning from each other.

3.1. Theme 1: Stuckness, Waithood, and Resilience

This first theme is by way of contextualizing the three that follow: “stuckness”, waithood”, and “resilience” describe the background conditions within which the mobile phone is used and against which the other themes are to be read. Many of the participants were “waiting” or “stuck” in some way. They were waiting for money to arrive, for responses to job applications, for an opportunity that might bring some social or economic leverage. Waiting for a time when they would no longer be dependent on parents, older siblings, or extended family. Waiting for a job. Such “waithood” is described by Singerman (2021, p. 33) as the “long, liminal period between adolescence and adulthood”, in which young people are not able to take up the full responsibilities of adulthood (particularly, employment and marriage) due to lack of resources. It is hard not to feel pessimistic: less than half of all matriculants move to tertiary education of some kind, or, having qualified, actually manage to obtain formal employment. Only 40.9% of matriculants achieved a bachelor pass in 2024, the highest number ever achieved (Wills et al., 2024). Of those who manage to enroll at a tertiary institution, 40% do not complete their degree. Even if you graduate, you are not guaranteed employment; South African unemployment figures are staggering. In 2022, the official youth unemployment rate for 15–24 years was 65.8% (Statistics South Africa, 2022), so the chances of achieving such independence are low.

Without a sure prospect of employment, the participants nevertheless carefully manage what social and economic resources they have access to. Far from passive, they use their time productively to “hustle”, rewriting matric subjects, mobilizing their social networks, engaging in small enterprises, and “giving back” to the community through voluntary NGO work, in the hope that these experiences and the social connections they foster may lead to something more substantial and permanent. We draw here on Simone’s (2020, p. 408) notion of “people as infrastructure” to describe how our respondents mobilize their social networks and “engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices” to better their life chances as well as fill the time left open by lack of full-time formal employment. Such tactics are otherwise described by Collins et al. (2009) as “portfolios of the poor”, strategies that help people tackle waithood in contexts of poverty. These strategies have been examined elsewhere in Africa, such as Weiss’ (2009) ethnographic research on Tanzanian youth who use media to manage economic marginalization and periods of waithood.

Thus Anele, for example, mentions that “I’m a civics action team member for PSAM, the Public Service Accountability Monitor…. And I’ve also just recently done a course as a community practitioner with Kagiso Trust”. Lithetha has a choir contract, “a part time thing I do at the cathedral [as part of the Cathedral choir]” and Unathi confides that “Currently I’m upgrading my a matric at ADC, Assumption Development Centre”. The mobile phone is central to all of these activities, used, for example, to communicate with peers as part of their TTTP responsibilities, organize lifts, collect study groups together, or download and access study materials. This agency shows remarkable resilience, as the young people we spoke to did not “give up”, despite frequent setbacks and disappointments. Their energy in finding ways to “give back” to their communities and constructively seek out and engage with new experiences demonstrates how these young people see themselves as “civic agents” (Fuh, 2021) as they imagine and work towards creating paths out of marginalization.

Yet, we are reluctant to valorize resilience as an ‘answer’ to marginalization. Nkosana’s experiences illustrate this point. During the week, he works part-time at the Joza Youth Hub as a digital assistant, helping learners use the PCs and do their homework. But, without formal employment, he cannot afford his own accommodation and lives at his older brother’s house. He also relies on parents for support during tough times. Reflecting on his journey to sobriety after a three-month stay in a rehabilitation clinic, which his parents funded, he shares, “they’re quite supportive”. Given his age—at the time of the interview he was 30—and the fact that he graduated with a diploma in Fine Art, Nkosana’s dependency is rendered more bitter by having to endure taunts from acquaintances—“you just went to school, but now you still in the location”—a not-uncommon response to those who try but fail to escape poverty and immobility through education (Schoon & Strelitz, 2014). ‘Resilience’ thus takes a heavy toll: the “hidden costs” (Theron, 2012) of Nkosana’s story of resilience forbids any naive celebration of such strategies. As Arora (2019) argues, the activities of the youth are not a panacea for the deficiencies of the state where it fails to provide for its young people.

3.2. Theme 2: Music: Where the Local Meets the Global

One of the ways in which our respondents occupy their time and thereby manage the state of waithood is by cultivating an extensive knowledge of and appreciation for global and local music. Music consumption ranges from keeping up with favorite international artists to creating Spotify playlists of local music, including Afro-pop, hip-hop and amapiano. Whether they are fans of global artists or of local celebrities, music fills the hours spent at home or walking to and from their spaces of work, shapes and reflects their social and political awareness, connects them to friends and family, and colors their inner lives.

Music, both local and international, has historically played an important social and political role in South Africa, as it has throughout Africa, becoming a particularly resonant genre within popular culture during and after colonialism (Barber, 2018). It has been central to the cultivation of youth identity in South Africa, both during colonialism and apartheid (Martin, 2013) and after the political transition (Dolby, 2001; Haupt, 2008; Livermon, 2020), serving to foster political solidarity (Allen, 2004; Jolaosho, 2013; Nkoala, 2013) and to express social and cultural affiliation (Ballantine, 1993; Coplan, 2008; Hammett, 2009).

Music choices are sometimes refracted inwards, towards the self, indicating the power that music has to charge, shape, and reflect the development of a personal identity (Hesmondhalgh, 2014). In Lithetha’s case, music is central to who they are as a person, a musician. Their involvement with music groups and activities associated with institutions in town, such as the Rhodes Music School and the Anglican Cathedral, also helps them to distinguish themselves from peers in the township who are, as Lithetha says, “giving up”. But this decision to not “just sit at home” is also part of an ongoing project of identity formation as Lithetha explores their gender identity and their struggles to be accepted as a gender-nonconforming person within the township space where such identities can face opprobrium and even violence (Langa, 2020). Lithetha’s mobile is logistically important for organizing the music groups they belong to: “Sometimes I have to like, help: call the taxi driver to take us home, stuff like that”. But more important are the mobile apps Lithetha uses to record voice parts, tune their pitch, search for and download practice songs, and share the music with choir mates. Spotify is a key app for them: “I have Spotify Premium, so basically, I find my songs there. If I can’t find a certain song, then there are those websites for pirating and stuff”. Lithetha also listens to Spotify playlists while alone, “the person I always play is Big Eyes by Lana Del Ray”. Del Ray’s melancholic and romantic style seems to suit Lithetha’s positionality as they moodily reflect on the difficulties they face as a gender-nonconforming person and the “stuckness” young people experience in Makhanda.

But listening to international music also indicates an outward-facing orientation, a desire to participate in the global flow of celebrity culture and the success it signifies. Thus, Kazimla asserts, “During the day, I’m more, like, listening to international music, hip-hop, all these kinds of like, especially USA and UK. I’m in love with USA music and UK music”. Like many who are fascinated by the commercial success of American hiphop artistry (Light, 2004), for him, American music just “makes sense”. In particular, he admires the clever lyrics: “Firstly, it’s the wordplay for me; it’s how they write their music”. He disagrees with critics who complain that celebrity artists such as Drake simply rap the songs written for them and declares, “I understand because, like, in order to make a perfect song, you have to, like, bring a group of people to work with you”. It is this production quality that he admires—the polish of high-end entertainment media, which local artists might find hard to reproduce. “So like, the music in USA, UK, it’s complete. I will say that’s really complete”, he declares.

Celebrity hip-hop artists like Drake are popular with most of the young men: “Well, it’s hip-hop, you know, a lot of Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole”, says Unathi, a type of sound that he explains is “Not gangster. It’s more like a… very chilled hip hop”. Wearing earphones connected to his mobile, he listens to their songs on his way to the Youth Hub, a 40 or 50 min walk from home. “I love listening to their stories”, he explains. “They tell stories through their music. So I like listening to these stories and actually get a sense of the type of people they are in their music”. It is not difficult to see that artists such as Lamar are role models for upward mobility, material and social success, and the hope of “making it” out of the “ghetto” as he explains. They also represent an escape from geographical “stuckness” and the allure of belonging to a global culture, as seen through global media platforms. Such music becomes part of a matrix of media content, creating a sense of a shared history with the USA and Black American experience, which enables a critique of the local (Haupt, 2008). Sixolise, for example, not only watches American animation, such as Family Guy and the Rick and Morty show, which “address issues in America but in a subtle and funny way”. He also uses his mobile to listen to music that appears confined to “about six [hip-hop artists]” who are “all underground, meaning that they are non-commercial; you don’t see them on TV, radio, or anything at all. Just buy the music on the internet”. Reflecting Hammett’s (2012) observations on the critical political role played by local hip-hop, he is motivated by the messages they communicate, for they address “very, very deep issues”. These include “political corruption, inequality, especially in America, and... black consciousness”, the kind of “stuff that they don’t talk about too much at home, [in] my community, [or on] TV”. For this reason, the music he engages with is “not just for entertainment. I learn from it”.

Hlonipile, in contrast, turns to South African musicians for inspiration: “I like Prince Kaybee and Msaki currently”. One of Prince Kaybee’s songs, featuring Msaki (Kaybee, 2019, Fetch Your Life), could almost be an anthem for Makhanda’s youth:

“We live for the weekend, working up the courage. We pray away, pray away, pray away the pain of not being in alignment with our dreams”.

For Hlonipile, Msaki is attractive not simply because she is a young female artist from the Eastern Cape who inspiringly graduated from Rhodes University. It is the fact that Msaki has “a calling... which connects with the ancestors and God at the same time” that resonates with Isipho’s own spiritual quest: “it makes me interested and wanting to know more, and having the same thing of the spiritual life as loving God”, she explains. Music that evokes a spiritual dimension is also important for Livuyo, who is himself undergoing initiation as a traditional healer. He similarly chooses to listen to local musicians, for they connect him to his local identity: “I listen to a lot of different traditional music, like music from Mozambique, Malawi... instrument players, music from Zimbabwe, like Stella Chiweshe, who is a specialist in [mbira]”. Local music is both a balm and a tonic: “I use music just to motivate myself, playing traditional music”.

3.3. Theme 3: Gambling and Fakes

All the participants aspire to a better life. However, in today’s neoliberal world, the socially legitimate routes by which one arrives at success are narrow and require long years of study as well as ‘work experience’ before a ‘real’ job (with benefits such as leave and health insurance) becomes possible (Wilson, 2018). This path differs materially from the image of success achieved—images that are readily available via mobile phone, on social media platforms, and edutainment media. The combination of the seductive mirage of “insta-fame” that circulates through social media, the ambiguity of what counts as success, and the ambition to achieve in an environment where the odds are stacked against succeeding through prescribed pathways is a potent combination (Casciano, 2024). It is in such an environment that the mobile provides the means to an alternative path to financial success, with the added benefit of the glamour that accompanies a daring risk-taker. This willingness to take risks even when one has very little should not be surprising, for neoliberal subjectivity depends on one’s flexibility and capacity to live precariously (Wilson, 2018). Indeed, risk is a condition of youth success in the global south, where material survival is not guaranteed (Cooper et al., 2019), and where aspirational capital, “the ability to hold onto hope in the face of structured inequality” (Yosso, 2005, p. 77), is a motivating resource.

Gambling and forex trading apps, easily downloadable and accessible on mobile phones, appeared popular, especially among the young men in our study group. Such apps, and the use of social media to advertise them, have been flagged in research on gambling in Africa, where “youth populations are increasingly connected to global circuits of sport, popular culture and speculative forms of consumption” (Glozah et al., 2023, p. 153; James & Bradley, 2021). These pursuits, the pastimes of otherwise unoccupied hours, were mentioned by several of our respondents in matter-of-fact tones. Sesethu recounts how he became addicted to TikTok. It was not for the amusing videos:

“Yeah, I got caught up on the tricks that were done there—some ways of growing money, things like that. So I got caught up, and I was like, I’m trying this; I want to try this. [But now I realise] some of these are just scams. Some of these fixes are just fake. Nothing is done like that”.

This addiction may have cost him his degree: “I remember the first time when I started to watch TikTok, I was… at college. The first results were a disaster”. Yandisa similarly recalls with aversion how she was led astray by a gambling app: “No, no. Not gambling, I once tried Betway, yho! until Betway chowed my money, I was like, okay, thank you… No more Betway for me”.

But such risks are taken for granted by the young men at least, for the gamble that the app enables, with its potential for a lucky win, seems to stand in for the quotidian tries and failures they suffer through. So, for example, while waiting for the learners whom he teaches to arrive at the Hub, Nkosana checked to see if there had been a response to his application for a job in the city of Gqeberha, 130 km from Makhanda: “I kind of applied for a job, a general worker position since there’s no much posts regarding my career and stuff”—an oblique reference to his unused Fine Arts diploma. But there was no email; so instead, he immediately “decided to play some bets on Betway”, a pastime that, given his knowledge of the sports scene, enables him to win small amounts of money: “I normally win every weekend. I know if I don’t have cash, I’ll have 300 Rand from the betting app”, he explains. “But”, he is quick to reassure the interviewer, “I’m not addicted because I only play soccer and rugby”, a reference to the alcohol addiction that, as we learnt above, landed him in rehab for three months.

Kazimla’s relationship with online trading forums is also instructive. He passed his matric exams well enough to gain admission to Rhodes University but says he was “excluded” after the first year—perhaps because he did not gain sufficient credits to continue. Having failed to pass his BCom subjects (“It’s really hard... because of accounting”), he has created his own enterprise through “forex trading” using the “MetaTrader” app on his mobile. He talks at length about the risks he takes. His MetaTrader activity is akin, for him, to the precariousness of life:

“This life is about win some, lose some. So in order to like, win something, you have to like, sacrifice. Yourself, your time. And then sometimes it’s money [that you have to sacrifice]”.

However, his current MetaTrader risks are theoretical only, for he plays on a demo account, and he cannot withdraw the profits that he makes, “just using strategies and knowledge”. Nevertheless, he declares with some pride that he took his virtual investment “from 100 thousand into 3 million in this month of training and practice”, a feat that he achieved by drawing on the insight that he receives from using a range of apps linked to online trading, such as “investing.com. It just shows you what happens in the market on a daily basis”. Such is the allure of the online marketplace that he even invested money buying an online course in Forex trading. It seems simple: “Just apply the strategy they showed us and then make money just like that”. His ongoing interest is fueled by a fantasy of tapping a virtual pool of unlimited online currency: “Every day in the market, there’s 1 trillion that is released, so that it’s floating; it’s just floating... So that’s why you have to take your chances. Maybe you got a share on that 1 trillion”. “I don’t know if it’s true”, he muses.

These risks, the hook of “dummy” accounts, imaginary money, and the pressure to win via shortcuts strangely mimic the harder road to success of earning a degree and relevant experience. They are, in effect, a form of “fakery” in which a burnished but veneer-thin substitute stands in for, and exists alongside, the real thing (White, 2021). The mobile, with its networked apps, opens the doors to such fakes, and the interns become alert to the dangers they pose, perhaps because they have, like Anele and Yandisa above, once been stung.

Thus, Sivuyile, who is looking for a girlfriend, constrains his search to his local community and prefers to meet young women in person rather than initiating conversations with them on his mobile: “No, I don’t really use the phone to [meet young women]. I just talk to them”, he states, explaining that this is “because some of them... pretend to be someone they are not... Maybe it’s [a] guy trying to [take his] chances, so that’s why I like to meet the person”. It turns out this catfishing story was true: “I did experience it. It was someone, I think who lived in Port Alfred, who pretended to be a girl I knew”. He now worries about scammers hacking his Facebook account.

3.4. Theme 4: Well-Being

Unsurprisingly, the precarity of unemployment and the constraints of lived conditions in Makhanda East take their toll on young people’s sense of well-being, as local quality of life studies indicate (Cramm et al., 2012). However, few resources are available for emotional and mental healthcare in township spaces (Das-Munshi et al., 2016). In these circumstances the mobile phone becomes a lifeline for self-care: “If wellbeing is centered on the overall satisfaction we get from life... then the term ‘digital wellbeing’ refers to the ways through which digital technologies positively impact people’s lives” (Mutsvairo et al., 2023). The mobile diary interviews indicated that the integration of mobile technology into daily life provides our respondents with access to resources that promote mindfulness, emotional regulation, and positive social relationships.

Perhaps most importantly, our respondents used their mobiles to connect (usually via WhatsApp) to networks of friends and family members. Inversely, when circumstances interrupt connectivity, it can cause real distress. Thus, when Nkosana’s girlfriend does not arrive on time, he fears for her safety and texts her, but “I was panicking since my battery life was low and it was load-shedding”2. Mvuysi similarly describes his failed attempts to restore his Eskom connection (and thereby charge his phone and use his household appliances) as “a lot of things that were trying to stress me”. “Sometimes it [stress] changes also how we think”, he reflects, after recounting his frustrating and unproductive morning. He eventually manages to borrow a friend’s phone, which he uses to buy pre-paid electricity. Tellingly, he defuses by visiting a friend: they spend the afternoon “just chilling there, sitting”, “listening to TruFM, to Dr Ngubengwe… a traditionalist” who plays “cultural traditional music”, while they debate the “social issues and the problems that we are experiencing”.

It is well known that music plays an important role in regulating individual well-being (McFerran et al., 2019), as Wandile’s narrative illustrates. She lives in her grandmother’s home with ten other people. It is a brick-and-tile home with electricity and Wi-Fi. But this “hasn’t been working... for like, a month now”, so she buys data with her own money to be able to work and use her mobile internet, which she needs for her early-morning self-care rituals: a 30-min meditation and listening to “calming” music on Spotify. She does this to center herself because, as she says, “she has a wandering spirit” and also suffers from anxiety and depression.

“I try to like, collect myself, to centre myself in the morning. So I meditate and then [listen] to… calming music”.

Music is important because it speaks to her but not at her: “I always turn to music rather than people because I know music won’t speak back to me, but it does speak to me; it’s like listening to... the lyrics that one person writes”. One source of distress is that Wandile has no relationship with her father, a not-unusual situation in South Africa where many fathers are “absent” due to the ongoing social consequences of apartheid and contemporary unemployment (Hunter, 2010; Richter & Morrell, 2008). She also has an on-and-off relationship with her mother, a more distressing situation perhaps, for in the South African context mothers are generally regarded as the primary caregiver (Moore, 2013). Her mobile plays an important role in helping to maintain and mediate their mother-daughter relationship. For, although she describes herself as “a bubbly person”, she finds it “really hard to like, talk, to have a heart-to-heart conversation with people”, she confides. But music helps because when she listens to songs, “I get to like, hear how people express themselves in some situations”. She effectively uses these examples to communicate with her mother: “I usually send a song, or screenshot the lyrics of the song, and then just send it to her and tell her this is how I’m feeling right now”.

Meditation apps have been shown to have some efficacy in reducing subjective feelings of distress in Northern contexts (Gál et al., 2021; Goldberg et al., 2020; Huberty et al., 2019). Although not much is known about their use in Africa, research indicates that such apps are known and used by South African students, and that there is a demand for apps that are more affordable and suited to the African context (Mudau et al., 2024). Yandisa meditates in order to help her manage her stress. She was taught how to meditate by her “big brother”, a person she admires, for he has a master’s degree in education from Rhodes and was her “supporter” after she lost her boyfriend. She describes how he would take her to mediate at the Monument [an arts facility on a hill overlooking the west side of town]:

“he’ll be like, ‘Okay, now, just keep quiet and listening to nature’. And then we’ll be okay, but after a few minutes, I’ll be like, ‘wow okay, this is it’. [W]hen we get home… he will ask me ‘How do you feel?’ I’m like, ‘Okay, this helps’”.

He also introduced her to YouTube meditation videos after “he used to meditate and then I would get bored”. It felt unfamiliar—in fact, “I wasn’t feeling a bit comfortable, because they would say ‘just, just sit where you be comfortable, try and listen to whatever’”. She now uses her “phone and [a] white candle” to mediate: “I pray before I meditate. I meditate using my phone or watch YouTube”. She doesn’t use an app yet, just YouTube videos, “Because I just started”. Nor does she follow any account in particular, as “I’m just searching meditation. And then I click to that person”.

A few of our respondents chose to disengage from social media. Digital disengagement, or ‘detox,’ is claimed to combat the negative psychological impacts associated with excessive screen time, enhance well-being, and foster authentic human connections (Radtke et al., 2022; Syvertsen & Enli, 2020). This is an under-researched aspect of digital use and well-being in the African context, which Mutsvairo et al. (2023, p. 98) argue deserves more attention due to the “the complex dialectics between digital time, social and cultural context, usage duration, and overuse”. Sixolise, for example, confides that he prefers to stay detached from social media. “I don’t do social media and stuff, I only do WhatsApp and that’s because I have to [for communication purposes]”. He dislikes the mental distraction social media causes: “I don’t like it, it’s too crowded, too many influences. Even though I don’t pay attention, but my mind does pay attention to it”. To avoid the distraction, he reads downloaded self-help books, and only uses his phone to link up with a friend with whom he spends time talking face-to-face, discussing “stuff that people [usually] don’t want to hear about”. This detachment from social media is part of a repertoire of mobile practices that Sixolise uses to take care of himself: “My neighborhood is a very quiet place, but not that quiet”, he explains. “There’s a lot of smoking going on, minor crimes and all that. So I would say I use my phone to just shield myself from all that because every time you see me, you see me wearing earphones [listening to music]”. Reflecting on what this means, he adds, “I don’t know how to put it, [my mobile is] sort of like my vehicle, I’m in my own vehicle. Everybody sees me through the window. I see them through the window, but they can’t get in. It’s something like that. It’s a shield”.

4. Discussion

The depth and diversity of the data emerging from the mobile diary method proved both surprising and rewarding. Together with the use of a narrative analysis approach, it brings into vivid focus the participants’ individuality and the variety of their outlooks, interests, aptitudes, and desires. We were particularly struck by the way in which the method gently revealed the complexity of our participants’ lives. Like young people everywhere, they are navigating the road to adulthood with all the interests, confusions, and expectations of this period of life. Mobile phones form a crucial part of these personal experiences and contribute to the outcomes of their life trajectories, mediating and connecting them. As such, they contribute to the richness and variety of our respondents’ lifeworlds as they navigate the hurdles attendant on social marginalization.

The four themes that we chose to discuss illustrate how mobiles are deeply embedded within township socialities; simultaneously, the ways in which they are used reflect back on the inequalities of the social and infrastructural contexts of which they form a part. Mobile phones are integral to the organization of our respondents’ daily lives as they strategize and work towards escape routes from “stuckness” and the “waiting” associated with marginalization. In this context, the mobile becomes a lifeline, connecting young people not only to support networks but also to content that promotes well-being. Meditation apps and music are commonly used by our respondents to regulate their inner lives. Indeed, music, both local and international, is universally enjoyed, speaking to both personal and social identities as well as connecting young people to the global flows of popular culture. However, mobile phones are not a panacea and may even contribute to the burdens of marginality: lack of connectivity due to infrastructural and economic deficits adds to stress levels; some need to disengage from the distractions of social media and seek face-to-face connections; and yet others turn to gambling apps or fall prey to fake relationships. The strength of this method is that it prevents the researcher from viewing the dimensions of sociality and digitality as binary forms (e.g., connected/unconnected). Rather than simplistic views, we see them as woven together in a rich tapestry that reflects the complexity of digitality and its relationship to sociality in our part of the “majority world”. In so doing, the data does justice to the difficult experiences of our participants without naively celebrating youthful resilience.

5. Conclusions

When we began this research, it was with the intention of “filling a gap” in the literature on youth and mobiles in Africa. We were curious about how and why mobiles “matter” to our participants, the ways in which they are part of everyday socialities, and how they might support well-being in resource-constrained social spaces. To explore these issues, we used the “mobile diary”, a decolonial method of data collection that enables young people to speak about their everyday digital practices within the fine grain of everyday social and personal life—where the mobile matters. We found that the method produces richly nuanced, even surprising, data that, due to their complexity, are suited well for this kind of nquiry. As we worked with a naturally occurring group, we cannot claim that the results of this research are generalizable. Instead, they are a starting point for a larger discussion about the roles that mobile phones actually play in marginalized spaces in Africa. The four themes that emerge from the data suggest that more scholarly attention should be given to the ways in which young people use mobile devices to manage precarity and support well-being. A significant limitation is that this article is not able to present the full range of themes that emerged from the data. In addition, the data in each of the thematic areas only scratches the surface of the phenomena under discussion. Future research could examine these dimensions of digitality and social life in Africa in more detail.