Page 306 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

hand with the genesis of new Pentecostal practices of mediation, which thrive
on distraction in that they imply mass spectatorship and draw Pentecostalism
into the sphere of entertainment, all attempts at recasting distraction as devo-
tion notwithstanding.

Pentecostalism in the Public Sphere

In the course of the last decade, the place and role of Pentecostalism has
changed tremendously. The year 1992 formed the watershed between a long pe-
riod of military rule, in which the state dominated the media and society, and
the turn to a new democratic constitution, which led to the gradual liberaliza-
tion and commercialization of radio, TV, ¤lm, and the press. This turn oc-
curred under the condition of neoliberal global capitalism, which granted mar-
ket forces much more in®uence on domains hitherto managed by the state than
ever before, and signi¤cantly curtailed its power and capacity to deliver the
goods to its citizens (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). One implication of
these developments, particularly relevant to this essay, concerns the incapacity
of the state to fully control religion and media, and thus the politics of repre-
sentation. Whereas, until 1992, the state could easily employ the media in sup-
port of its cultural policies favoring what became rei¤ed as “our African heri-
tage,” the situation became more diverse thereafter, when these cultural policies
became increasingly contested by the Pentecostals, who promote a “complete
break with the past” and tend to demonize local cultural and religious traditions
(Meyer 1998).
In order to grasp the implications of these changes, it is useful to take as a
point of departure a very concrete recon¤guration of urban space that pin-
points how Pentecostalism takes over hitherto secular realms: the conversion of
state-owned as well as private cinemas into churches. One Sunday morning in
late September 2002, when I had just returned to Ghana for a last stint of ¤eld-
work on Ghanaian video ¤lms, my friend and colleague, Kodjo Senah, joined
me on a car ride through Accra. On our route, unhampered by traf¤c jams
which can be dreadful on a weekday, we passed by virtually all the cinemas in
Accra: Olympia at Labadi, Regal at Osu, Rex, Opera, and Globe in Central Accra,
Roxy at Adabraka, Orion at Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Oxford in Newtown, and
Dunia in Nima. All were being used by Pentecostal-Charismatic churches, ex-
cept Oxford which has been transformed into a department store. Already from
afar one could hear the preachers displaying their virtuosity and eloquence in
preaching the Word, the congregation praying in tongues, or the church’s mu-
sical band playing swinging Gospel Highlife. In all this, loudspeakers were cru-
cial mediators of the divine message, used not simply to reach the congrega-
tion inside but, above all, to communicate one’s presence to the world outside.
The fact that apparently “being heard” means “being there” indicates how Pen-
tecostalism seeks to capture public space not only through images but also
through sound.
While driving on, Kodjo told me how, as a child, he would go to watch ¤lms

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