| Résumé/Présentation |
"Since the early 1990s Pentecostal-Charismatic Church membership has spectacularly grown in Africa (Anderson 2001, Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001, Gifford 1998, Meyer 2004a). Scholars of these churches (which are sometimes also called Pentecostalist or Born-Again Churches) invariably mention how audiovisual media are used both in church gatherings and in the proselytising activities of their members. Not only street evangelism, but also print and audiovisual media are perceived as important tools for attracting potential converts. This is especially the case in dense urban societies like Lagos, Accra and Kinshasa. Yet, religious mass media are not all confined to local urban settings. Through a range of different media Pentecostalist leaders also reach out to people in other cities than their own, in villages and in the Diaspora, on the African continent and beyond. (...), Several explanations have been proposed to account for the appropriation of electronic media such as film, video, radio, and the internet by African Pentecostalist leaders. The global and cosmopolitan scope of these new Christian movements (Hackett 1998, Meyer 2004b), the desire for revelation in contrast to the assumed secrecy of so-called traditional African religious systems (Meyer 2006), and the orality of African societies push Pentecostalist leaders to use modern technological equipment in their predications. These explanations are sought in the peculiarity of African Pentecostalism, though they obliterate the use of mass media in the evangelising work of missionaries during the colonial period. Revisiting the colonial past and taking into account the interfaces of religion and visual media before the heydays of Pentecostalism will, as I hope, contribute to our understandings of how Pentecostalist leaders have been drawn to capture mass media. I attempt to illustrate this with material about Kinshasa?s media history."
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