Abstract
The growing body of literature on mobile phones in Africa seems to stress at least two somewhat paradoxical perspectives: Its ability to connect a fixed person with a wandering target or to connect a wandering person with a fixed target. One narrative is an encounter with new social relations, otherwise known as “globalization” the other of connectedness to ‘home’, often called “belonging”. Following conflict in the Sudan, about two-thirds of the population originating from the Nuba Mountains has migrated to one of the urban centers of Northern Sudan or abroad to Cairo, the UK or the US. Currently, the most important ways these dispersed and fragmented families keep in touch is through the mobile phone. Furthermore, the mobile phone is a site for new spaces of interaction, a place where in-group intimacy based on concepts of “home” can be expressed.
The use of names as indices of origin will be examined in this chapter in the context of several text messages, as such terms say a lot about how people perceive their physical and social distance, and categorize others. While urban migration has increasingly fused regional distinctions in Sudan, urban identities are simultaneously sharpened, largely defined by one’s balad (place of origin). Through the use of reference terms and other evidence, it is suggested that some marginalized Nuba student migrants living in the urban capital of Khartoum use the mobile phone in part to create a place of belonging. It is instrumental to urban migrants since it allows the maintenance of group interactions that defy distance and time, while providing a context for the sharing of familiar terms of reference. But meanings of ‘home’ differ across the Nuba students. For some who have arrived more recently and maintain closer kinship ties, ‘home’ is meant in the literal sense, while for a second group, ‘home’ is meant in the ideological and highly politicized sense as a ‘homeland’ or place of origin.