Tobacco companies see Africa as fertile ground DIEPSLOOT, South Africa - On the sunny side of a dusty township street, next to the metal gates of a school, Lucas Moyana's little shop is just a board propped on four plastic crates like a child's lemonade stand. For a couple of coins, he sells being cool, sells being free. A schoolboy in uniform hurries up, barely glancing at the cookie packets, lollipops and candies, grabs a Dunhill cigarette from a red box, puts a match to it and drops 22 cents on the table before hurrying away. Moyana is at his stand, just a few yards from the school gates, most days from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Asked why he set up next to the school, he looks awkward. "I just decided this was a good spot," he says vaguely, basking in the hot spring sun. Every few minutes, a customer tosses some change onto his table, plucks a cigarette, lights it. Africa is Big Tobacco's last frontier, and companies are conquering the continent stick by stick. Even a child can afford the cost of a single cigarette, 16 cents for Moyana's cheapest brand. South Africa has some of the toughest regulations on the continent. Unlike in the United States, though, where the sale of packs with fewer than 20 cigarettes is prohibited, selling cigarettes single, or "one-one," is not specifically banned here. It's twice as profitable for Moyana to sell cigarettes one-one. He doesn't even bother to display sealed packs. And although it is illegal here to sell cigarettes to anyone younger than 18, he doesn't turn them away. Tobacco use is declining in the developed world. It's reached a plateau in the strongest market, Asia. But it is growing in Africa, because of the continent's booming population and rapidly expanding middle class. "This is a major battleground," says Yussuf Saloojee of South Africa's National Council Against Smoking. The African population is very young. If they can hook customers now, they've got customers for the next 40 or 50 years. So the prospects of an increasing market share are very good. In Diepsloot, there's a way of walking that shows you almost own the township. Johnnie Thobejane's pace is quiet but powerful, and so slow that time seems trapped in every step. At 20, he and his friends are still making their way through school, and they buy lollipops sometimes, when they don't mind looking like kids. But a cigarette costs the same as a lollipop, so when they have a few dimes, they mostly buy cigarettes from Moyana's stall. Thobejane has been smoking since he was 13 and says all his male school friends do as well. "All of them, they smoke," he says with a laugh. It's like the smoking department. In South Africa, tobacco advertising is banned, but Thobejane and his friends don't need a TV commercial. It keeps me rollin', keeps me walkin'. It's cool," says Thobejane, speaking like an American hip-hop artist. He goes through six cigarettes a day, because that's what he can afford. Across the continent, young men like Thobejane are at the heart of tobacco companies' campaign to capture the African smoker. Few African women smoke, but 20% to 30% of men in many African countries do, more than half of them younger than 35, according to a 2011 World Health Organization report. In South Africa, 35% of men smoke, one of the highest rates in sub-Saharan Africa. African activists' battle to protect the young echoes those fought and won in the United States and Europe decades ago. The tobacco industry went to South Africa's top court recently to defend its constitutional right to advertise cigarettes, and lost. The market is so severely restricted that you can't really aggressively market the product. Restrictions are getting more and more strict, right across the continent," says Francois van der Merwe, chairman of the Tobacco Institute of Southern Africa.