The global uptake of mobile phones has presented many opportunities for analysis by social scientists. One of the main issues under discussion is the correlation between mobile phone communication and poverty eradication. In Mobile Secrets. Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique, Julie-Soleil Archambault frames her analysis around this conundrum, yet does so without reducing the question to a simple yes or no formula. This incisive ethnography, carried out in Inhambane (a small city in southwest Mozambique), provides novel arguments in particular to the ICT4D-paradigm (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Mobile phones, Archambault informs us, allow for alternative circulations of money, while enabling new forms of autonomy and control (157). These outcomes are unexpected if one ignores the relevance of the house, the bed, and the neighborhood as spaces informing the economy of mobile phones, the distribution of attention, the expression of respect, and the formulation of aspirations. In Inhambane, such social spaces and the relationships therein are deeply embedded in a regime of truth and value that can be summarized as a culture of pretense. Everyday sociality, (virtual) matrimony, and business-client relationships, as well as the aesthetics and economy of mobile communication in Inhambane thrive on calibrations of the visible and the invisible. Just like black bags, fences, and loud music, mobile phones are technologies of ambiguation and concealment, mobilized in order to achieve or mitigate particular social and economic ends.

Mobile Secrets leads the reader through six chapters and a conclusion, offering a compelling insight into what it is like to be a young adult in post-war, postsocialist Mozambique, while also situating the analysis within discussions about relationality, urban livelihoods, and postcolonial economics. In the introduction, Archambault defines the major concepts that inform her analysis: uncertainty, respect, secrecy, and visão. The latter is a container concept that integrates the management of visuality: knowing what to see and what to show. Crucial to this analysis are people’s constant efforts to reject a life of survival in favor of a quest for the good life. Many of Archambault’s interlocutors expect that the mobile phone can contribute to the materialization of a fulfilling life.

Chapter 1 begins with a more economic and historical perspective, as here Archambault offers a politico-economic account of the communication landscape. Strikingly, many Mozambicans understand the mobile phone as “being development” (41). In Chapter 2, the analysis elaborates on the importance of appearance, performance, and of pretense. Particularly insightful is the discussion about respectfulness and respectability, and how the types of mobile phones, usage, and text messages can become key tools in practices of display and disguise, two strategies underpinning the performance of respect. Chapter 3 introduces the handset as an object of desire, so coveted that it has become prone to theft. Here, Archambault carefully considers various inequalities in Inhambane. We understand how the mobile phone allows Inhambane’s youth to try to overcome cycles of (mis)fortune. Chapter 4 then demonstrates how the mobile phone has become an actor in forging new networks, including illicit affairs. Bypassing the interference of kin and other match-makers, mobile phone users obtain direct access to love interests through their phone numbers. Yet, we learn how this immediate access to intimate others is perceived ambiguously, as it can easily lead to turmoil, distrust, and even break-ups. Chapter 5 engages with Inhambane’s sexual economy, and illustrates how mobile phones allow for new registers to construct masculinity and femininity. In the exchange of air time, the handset itself, bips, and text messages, gendered negotiations in the intimate sphere are taking place. The final chapter points at practices of knowledge gathering and information sharing. Where Inhambane youth play with exposure and ignorance, at times they value opacity and confusion more than transparency. We learn how the mobile phone is keenly integrated in these highly dynamic oppositions of sharing and hiding, informing and keeping secrets.

In the conclusion, the question whether the mobile phone contributes to poverty eradication reappears. Archambault convincingly contends that this might be the wrong question after all. Isn’t it more compelling to understand how these phones are integrated in attempts to lead a more fulfilling life rather than searching for evidence of cost efficiency, accumulation, and increase of material wealth?

This monograph is a fascinating read. The analysis has impressive depth, rigor, and complexity, as Archambault writes with command of key texts in the anthropological discipline, and seemingly effortlessly communicates utmost intimate insights into the interactions between men and women in Inhambane. Writing against the notion of “creativity,” a popular rubric in the study of African popular culture, Archambault dissects how an incoming technology dialogues with indigenous repertoires of sociality and epistemologies. This is also a story about how “beginners” (new users) integrate, implement, and value technologies, and how these practices mesh with other forms of relating and futuremaking. Indeed, as this ethnography ably demonstrates, there is much more to say about mobile communication on the continent than tales of appropriation, economic empowerment, and political activism.