This is one of numerous articles I wrote for the Sunday News (Tanzania) column "Letter from Butiama" between 2005 and 2011. Publication date: 17th September 2006.
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I realised some years ago that I hardly
received letters anymore. After some reflection it was evident I was getting
the output of my own input. I hardly write letters.
Yet for several years since I made those
two discoveries, I routinely went to the post office to look for responses to
letters I had not written.
Sometime last year, a team from the
Tanzania Posts Corporation (TPC) visited Butiama to evaluate the performance of
Butiama’s only post office. They wanted to confirm what they knew already, that
stamp sales were falling because there were less people writing letters.
They told me they would recommend closure
of the post office, and when they sought my opinion I agreed with them. The
post office at Butiama seemed then like a place of worship, its doors were
closed more often then were open.
For the more than five years I have been at
Butiama I probably have received less than 15 letters from that office. If
there were any letter writers remaining at Butiama, they would be using the
Musoma post office, 42 kilometres away., but even their number should be
falling.
While Butiama’s post office has now closed,
the mobile phone company, Celtel, has recently constructed a new cell site at
Butiama, joining Vodacom and Tigo who share a tower.
You may not agree with me, but I would say
that the proliferation of mobile phones have contributed to the closure of
Butiama’s post office.
And it will further contribute to some
other changes in society. First, since there are less people writing on paper
rather than typing short messages on their phones, the quality of handwritings
is falling drastically and will continue to fall until technology helps us to
change poor handwriting into good handwriting.
Second, and what could be an advantage for
those who were born with a Nokia mobile phone next to their ear, we’ll have a
generation of people with lightening typing speeds because they would have
learnt how to write from a computer keyboard and a mobile phone keypad.
Third, we soon will have a generation of
youngsters who have never seen an old-fashioned letter. They would visit
museums to see some of the masterpieces of letters written in the past.
I remember growing up and writing to my brothers
and sisters who were in boarding school. When that was not enough I would begin
to write to some of their friends who were in the same schools.
I have kept some of the letters I wrote in
those days. Some of these letters were quite lengthy, of several pages long.
They should rightly be called newsletters instead of plain letters. I imagine
that in those years, I must have similarly lengthy replies, although I just
cannot imagine where all those words came from. The postal authorities did not
care; they were selling a lot of stamps.
Receiving letters was also such a special
event. My cousin Jackson, who had moved to Dar from Bumangi, a village close to
Butiama, to complete his primary education would not open a letter before
eating his supper. The reason? A letter could contain tragic news, such as a
death in the family, so precautions against losing one’s appetite had to be
taken.
While I long for the past and I place some
blame on the mobile phone for the gradual disappearance of the personal letter,
I cannot help but marvel about how far letter writing has come. In a 1983
article titled Historia ya Maendeleo ya Kiswahili Zanzibar, (The History
of the Development of the Swahili Language in Zanzibar) Mohamed Seif Khatib
quotes a letter written by King Kabaka Mutesa of the Kingdom of Buganda to the Governor of Zanzibar:
“…ahsante sana kunipelekea barua yako, uliyoniandikia katika Agosti 24,
1888. Ilinifikia katika Oktoba 1889” (“..thank you so much for dispatching
to me your letter, that you wrote August 24, 1888. It was received by me in
October 1889.”)
It took ten months for the letter to reach
Uganda from Zanzibar. These two were extremely important people in East Africa
in those days. One represented the British Empire, the other the Buganda
Kingdom. It is safe to say that their mail service was the fastest in East
Africa in those days. It would be the equivalent today of President Amani
Karume sending by government jet a special envoy to Entebbe where that envoy
will be driven straight to the Kabaka’s Palace (Lubiri) in Mmengo.
I cannot imagine the length of time it took
to deliver letters between ordinary Ugandans and Zanzibaris.
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