Page 178 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

political struggle,” this chapter examines the case of South Africa and the vari-
ous negotiations—at times acrimonious—over public religious broadcasting at
the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). These debates came to a
head as South Africa moved into its post-apartheid phase in the 1990s. The
literature on the role of religious organizations, predominantly the Christian
churches, in this political process is extensive (Cochrane, Gruchy, and Martin
1999; Gruchy 1995; Gruchy 1995; Kilian 1993; Villa-Vicencio 1992; Moosa
2001; Sundkler 1991; Johnston 1994; Oosthuizen 1999; Tayob 1998; Chidester
4
1996; Gifford 1988; Graybill 1995; Walshe 1995). The education sector as a po-
litically strategic location for religious representation is also well documented
(Chidester 1994, 2001; Dlamini 1994; Mitchell 1993; Steyn 1999; Stonier 1998;
Sachs 1993). So, too, is the signi¤cance of the media sector in facilitating the
new political dispensation (Tomaselli, Tomaselli, and Muller 2001; Netshitenzhe
5
1999). Less well analyzed is the religious dimension of public broadcasting, for
example, the emerging policy questions surrounding religious programming,
and issues of control and representation (Baker 2000; Nkosi 1994).
The chapter thus seeks to document and explore this neglected interrelation-
ship of religion and media in the South African context not just because of the
light it throws on the role of public religion in a nation-state in political tran-
sition but also because it provides an important insight into the mechanics of
religious representation in the mediated public sphere. This “production and
management of meaning” occurs not just at the formal, institutional level but
also as the result of internal (and, in the case of South Africa, external) debates
and con®icts (cf. McLagan 2000). Discussions are primarily limited to pub-
lic broadcasting, and the medium of television, in particular, for reasons of
space. As Graham Mytton (2000, 28) observes, most broadcasting in Africa is
6
still “centralized, national and state-dominated.” This is especially the case for
television (see Teer-Tomaselli and Tomaselli 2001, 140). Thus despite current
scholarly trends to link the electronic mass media with global scapes and ®ows
(Urry 2000, 161), and to favor “conceptualizing the world as a whole,” I have
chosen to focus on a nationally constituted society as a unit of analysis (King
1997, viii). Transnational and translocal forces are clearly active in South Africa
through the agency of religious and media institutions, which can serve to de-
territorialize the process of the imagining of communities. Michael Herzfeld
(2001, 312) comes to the rescue by arguing that “the various kinds of media,
ethnographically studied in context, can provide a very close look at the inter-
action of the local, the national and the international” and that anthropology’s
“subversive localism” can unmask globalization for the “realist ¤ction” it has
become (see, esp., Gunsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002).

Broader Contextual Issues
My ongoing research on religious con®ict and violence in Africa more
generally (Hackett 2004), and in Nigeria speci¤cally (Hackett forthcoming), no-
tably in connection with the imposition of Shari’a by northern states, clearly

Mediated Religion in South Africa 167