The cell phone has brought the past into the future by supporting Africans' oral traditions and the sheer pleasure they take in talking with one another. Their insatiable appetite for mobiles has made the continent a profitable market for the high-tech gadgets, which were introduced only a decade ago.

Ironically, because it's still harder to get an old-fashioned land-line phone, University of Swaziland sociologist Anthony Zwane explains, the rich consider it a mark of status not to use a cell phone. Thus, country clubs and upscale restaurants now ban the devices. Cell phones have become, instead, 'the people's way of communicating,' says Zwane, who notes that these days every bus conductor and street vendor has one.

'People are great talkers,' notes Ronnie Mkhombe, marketing manager of MTN Swaziland, the country's only cellular telephone provider. 'Cell phones allow average Africans to entertain each other through conversation, which is what Africans have always done. It's a relatively inexpensive entertainment.'

'Traditional African culture, with its emphasis on palaver and oral story-telling, boosts phone use as a means of social and family contact,' says Connie Manuel, a business consultant in Maputo, Mozambique. 'In contrast, you find a more terse type of communication in the West because people don't like to 'waste time' on the phone.'

For a country with a low level of economic activity relative to the developed world, Nigeria has a high level of minutes of use: The average cell phone is used for 200 minutes a week, compared to 154 minutes in France, 149 in Japan, 120 in Britain, and 88 in Germany.