When the chief of this Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher's home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes, residents in the village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.
"My wife and I were terrified," said teacher Michael Kimotho. "But the alarm raised by the chief helped."
The tweet from Chief Francis Kariuki was only his latest attempt to improve village life by using the microblogging site Twitter. Kariuki regularly sends out tweets about missing children and farm animals, showing that the power of social media has reached even into a dusty African village. Lanet Umoja is 100 miles west of the capital, Nairobi.
"There is a brown and white sheep which has gone missing with a nylon rope around its neck and it belongs to Mwangi's father," he tweeted recently in the Swahili language. The sheep was soon recovered.
Kariuki said even the thieves in his village follow him on Twitter. Earlier this year, the chief tweeted about the theft of a cow, and later the cow was found abandoned, tied to a pole.
Kariuki's official Twitter page shows 300 followers, but the former teacher estimated that thousands of the 28,000 residents in his area receive the messages he sends out directly and indirectly. He said many of his constituents, mostly subsistence farmers, cannot afford to buy smart phones but can access tweets through a third-party mobile-phone application. Others forward the tweets via text message."Twitter has helped save time and money. I no longer have to write letters or print posters, which take time to distribute and are expensive,"Kariuki said.
Follow chief Kariuki on Twitter @chiefKariuki
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A recent report said Twitter is enjoying big growth across Africa. It said South Africans use Twitter the most, but Kenya is second in usage on the continent.
The research by Kenya-based Portland Communications and Tweet minster found that over the last three months of 2011, Kenyans produced nearly 2.5 million tweets. More than 80 percent of those polled said they mainly used Twitter for communicating with friends. see map below:
This article appeared on page A - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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Want to see which countries tweet the most? Here's a map created by Portland Communications:
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