As Kenyan teenagers with freshly sharpened machetes searched for people from rival ethnicities earlier this month, text messages encouraging them to deal with enemies "the Rwanda way" flashed across their cellphone screens.
At the time, Kenya's information and communication permanent secretary, Bitange Ndemo, got a different message: block short message services, or SMSs.
Mr. Ndemo had quickly banned live radio and television broadcasts in the violent aftermath of the disputed general election, Dec. 27, 2007. Vernacular radio call-in shows had dehumanized ethnic communities as "weeds" and "animals" in an eerie echo of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when Tutsis were denigrated as "cockroaches."
But with hundreds dead, more than 300,000 on the run and thousands of similar messages jamming mobile networks, he chose not to block SMSs. "There were so many stranded people in the forests who were sending SMSs to their relatives," said Mr. Ndemo. "So, had we shut it down, we would have caused more damage than what we had intended to prevent."
In the wake of Kenya's recent chaos, some observers warn the cellphone could play a larger role in future ethnic conflicts in Africa if its omnipresence and the vulnerability to abuse of SMS technology are not countered with better laws.
The numbers are striking. Mobile phones are everywhere in Africa, despite its relative poverty. In fact, Kibera, Kenya's largest slum, is one of the country's biggest customers for mobile airtime.
And demand keeps growing. In 1999, one in 2,300 had a mobile phone. By 2004, it was one in 10. Now, it is one in four; of the nearly one billion people in Africa, nearly 100 million have a mobile.
The technology has pole-vaulted many African countries beyond their crumbling infrastructure and into the information age. But it has also exposed them to risks. No other continent struggles with ethnic conflict like Africa. With SMS the preferred method to communicate (they're cheaper than calls) and with cellphone-happy Kenya now picking up the pieces after ethnic war, the potential for SMS to incite hate is coming into focus.
"It's just a button you push," said Kamanda Mucheke, a senior officer with Kenya's human rights commission. Since 2005, the organization has been monitoring electronic messaging, like e-mail and SMS, for hate speech.
During Kenya's constitutional referendum in 2005, politicians preyed on tribal hatreds to sway votes. At the time, vernacular radio was the medium most infected with hate speech.
This time around, tribe was all important and SMS took the lead. "It's easier to use SMS than radio," said Mr. Mucheke. "There's more censorship on radio. There are no controls at the moment over SMS. That made it the most efficient and easiest medium to proliferate hate speech."
The moral block people have to spreading hate is easily overcome when a simple push of a button is all that's needed, adds Mr. Mucheke. Indeed, friends became conduits of the messages in post-election Kenya, as they asked readers to forward them on to their buddies and families. Hate hit viral proportions.
The message weren't only from people forwarding them along, but also came by the thousands from bulk SMS service companies.
The most infamous of the screeds stated, simply, "41 versus 1" — a nod to the 42 tribes of Kenya and the belief that one of them, the Kikuyu, of which President Mwai Kibaki is a member, has been hoarding the country's riches at the exclusion of others. The unwritten message: it's payback time.
Others were indecipherable to most people. Much like messages over vernacular radio, SMSs dehumanizing people as "spots" to be cleaned were written in tribal languages, said Mr. Mucheke. "Most of these things are done in metaphors. When I say 'Our people' in Kikuyu (a traditional language), it is meaningless to most, but it has a meaning to some people. There is nothing criminal, but the effect is powerful."
