ABSTRACT
On the windswept outer border of Grahamstown, a town in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, I met Beronice.1 Small and shy in a tracksuit and headscarf with large almond eyes, she is 19 and finished school more than a year ago. She has no immediate prospects for further study or employment, and family resources are non-existent with an unemployed mother and a father in jail. She lives in a bare, one-roomed house with three beds, a cupboard and a television in a neighbourhood known as Hooggenoeg, a typical South African low-income housing project. It is only thanks to her grandmother’s pension that she and her mother are able to survive and that Beronice was able to acquire a mobile phone. Despite her difficulties, she claims to maintain her self-esteem and sense of purpose through her mobile phone use. Her ‘moderate’ six hours spent daily on MXit is, she said, central to this.2 On MXit she chats mainly to people she has never met face-to-face and is particularly proud of the fact that these ‘friends’ include people from all of the country’s ‘racial’ groups. For Beronice, these constitute a complete set of South African friends: ‘I’ve got lots of Xhosa contacts. I’ve got white contacts, I’ve got Indian contacts, and I’ve got coloureds. So I’ve got everything. I chat with them all, and I enjoy it’.
