Page 184 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 8.1. Religious programs for all faiths. SABC programming re®ects a mix of South
Africa’s major religions—Christianity, African Religion, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism.
SABC Annual Report, 2002–2003.

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communities.” It vaunts the fact that the program Crux, on the life of the
Church, was one of the ¤rst magazine programs in South Africa to avail itself
of virtual reality technology, and that the program Crossing the Divide brought
together a pagan and an occultist on air. The highlighting of this particular en-
counter seems to trivialize an otherwise important and innovative program.
The noticeably slicker website in the 2000–2001 report was clearly seeking to
re®ect the diversity of the South African religious scene, and one could see im-
ages of black Zionist Christians, with a woman drumming in the foreground,
and the Torah. On the page outlining plans for the future, there was a composite
graphic with images of a multitude of religious leaders and practitioners. Apart
from the Pope, the majority of faces were non-white, with Hindus and Zulu
traditional worshipers in the foreground. The 2003 report has less complex im-
ages, but there is a stunning full-page illustration of a female Zionist worshiper.
A number of tradition-speci¤c programs were developed for television in the
post-1994 period, but these were consolidated under the rubric of the popular

Mediated Religion in South Africa 173