If there is a lack of existing, affordable infrastructure, members of the public cannot easily get the Internet in their homes. In America, where local phone calls are free and Internet access is cheap, the Internet has been accessible to the public for a much longer time than for the rest of the world - hence, there is much more of an underground presence. America is essentially the root of the global hacker community we have today. Up until fairly recently, the Internet was not accessible to anyone in Africa, until South Africa's first dial-up Internet service provider began operations several years ago. Therefore in a relatively short time South Africa developed its own underground hacker personalities, and hacker organisations and both started to grow in number.
Internet access is to be found throughout the country.
Recently some of these providers have begun expansion up to Namibia and Zimbabwe and are starting to offer comparable Internet access services to those found in South Africa. However, as stated earlier, Internet access to the home user is only viable where there is already an effective telephone infrastructure available to the public, and only when this is affordable to a large amount of people within an area does one start to see the formation of hackers and hacking groups. As the majority of the African countries have not yet developed an affordable phone system, the likely problem of hackers in those is likely to be much less acute. Thus, the only real presence of any form of digital underground is made up mainly of South Africans, with Namibia and Zimbabwe playing a very minor role. One must bear in mind however, that hacking has no borders - a hacker in Russia can just as easily hack into a South African system as a local system in his own country.