CELLULAR phones have come a long way since the first call was made on a brick-like phone in April 1983. Today, you can use your ­cellphone to make calls, send messages, access the Internet, send e-mails, listen to music and take photos.

Most young people seem hardwired from birth to understand how all this technology works — even my little two-year-old knows how to open a flip phone, press buttons and hold the phone to his ear — and Mobiles for Literacy (M4Lit), a group supported and funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, is keen to use that innate knowledge to get more young South Africans reading.

At the end of ­September, M4Lit launched Africa’s first dual-language mobile novel, or m-novel, titled Kontax. Penned by award-winning scriptwriter Sam Wilson of Cape Town-based production and content company Clockwork Zoo, it describes the adventures of a group of graffiti artists in a South African city.

Project leader and ICT specialist Steve Vosloo sees mobile literature as a tool for ­increasing literacy and a love of reading among the youth of the country.

In many areas of South Africa and other ­developing nations, it’s often easier to access a cellphone than the Internet or even a printed book. Teenagers also tend to make use of ­applications like MXit, making an m-novel easy for them to use.

“In South Africa, there is about 10% PC-based Internet connectivity,” Vosloo blogged on Tech Leader last month. “While the number of people with access to cellphones ranges from 60% to 90% (depending on which community you look at), of those phones, a high number are Wap-enabled and can access the internet.”

While Kontax is Africa’s first m-novel, the concept of mobile novels is not new. They evolved from text messaging, and are said to have been started by Japanese women writing about their romantic experiences.

The genre is hugely popular in Japan, with several websites luring authors with cash prizes of up to $100 000 (or R766 316), and ge nerous offers to buy the print publishing rights to their novels. In 2008, six of the 10 bestselling books in Japan ­began life on the tiny screen.

“We know that Japanese m-novels are very popular and for South Africa, this is the beginning of more to come,” said Vosloo.

To encourage young people to keep reading Kontax, M4Lit opted for a serial-release format, ­issuing one 400-word chapter every day over a period of three weeks, ensuring that young readers would come back for more. They also encouraged interaction and discussion of the plot through polls and comments, with the best comment from each day’s release winning ­airtime.

At the end of three weeks, registered readers were invited to submit their ideas for a Kontax sequel. This competition runs until November 20, and has a grand prize of R2 000 airtime, as well as two runner-up prizes of R1 000 and R500 worth of airtime, respectively.

Kontax is available to download from the website http://kontax.mobi/index.php in English and Xhosa. It can be accessed for free, ­although a once-off fee of R1,50 is charged when registering via cellphone. Those who don’t have Wap-enabled cellphones can still read the novel on the website.

Kontax: So, what’s the story about?

Kontax is essentially a mystery involving the four-member Kontax graffiti team of Sbu, K8 (Kate), Songezwa and Airtime. Each person plays an important role in the team, bringing strengths of vision, training, technique and creativity.

Graffiti is their life and they practise their craft wherever and whenever they can (and even where they shouldn’t).

At a party Sbu meets a mysterious girl who then ­disappears, leaving only her ­cellphone. Attempts to trace her prove fruitless, as her cellphone contact list offers no help at all.

The team senses danger but presses on, and eventually the characters find themselves in the middle of a ­kidnap drama. — Supplied by Shuttleworth Foundation, ­Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 South Africa.