Page 308 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of the ¤nancial breakdown of the GFIC, which had been unable to produce a
celluloid feature ¤lm for years, even at the time when it was under full state
control. Film production, as well as importing suitable foreign ¤lms and main-
taining the state-owned cinemas, appeared to be much too costly for the Gha-
naian state, which spent a great deal of the limited media budget on TV. Also
private cinema owners, for example, the Lebanese Captan family, found it dif¤-
cult to maintain its cinema houses (all those cinemas mentioned above begin-
ning with “O”), partly because of the increasing accessibility of TV and video
in private homes and partly because of years of curfew in the early period of
Rawlings’s military regime which prevented people from going out at night.
Even when the turn to democracy formally ended the previous “culture of si-
lence,” the old cinema industry was not revived again. Rather, its place was
taken by the medium of video, which can be projected both on cinema screens
and on TV.
When the Ghanaian video-¤lm industry emerged in the late 1980s, the pro-
ducers, usually self-trained persons who had been associated with the cinemas
as ¤lm distributors or operators or simply keen spectators, sought to mimic
the celluloid format, thus insisting that they made “Ghanaian ¤lms,” not just
videos. They fought for acceptance into the world of cinema, which was domi-
nated by the old artistic elites associated with the GFIC and NAFTI, the Na-
tional Film and Television Institute. As these groups more or less supported state
cultural policies, the centrality of Christian images, and the demonization of
local gods and spirits in video ¤lms, became a continuous bone of contention
(Meyer 1999b). Eventually Ghanaian video ¤lms were screened in the cinemas,
as well as in new smaller video centers set up in neighborhoods, with the help
of beamers. Yet, in the late 1990s, a shift occurred, and now, for commercial
reasons, videos are increasingly marketed as home videos and only after some
time shown on TV. As a result, the cinemas became increasingly run-down and
were ill-attended, standing instead as silent witnesses to a time when cinema
still played a key role in structuring modern public space (cf. Larkin 2002) and
offering access to a new public culture in colonial and early independent Ghana.
The Pentecostals were quick to assert their presence by occupying the de-
serted cinemas and buying airtime, thereby contributing to the emergence of a
new public sphere characterized by the retreat of the state and the public pres-
ence of Christianity. Many of the big Pentecostal-Charismatic churches run
their own media ministries, as does, for instance, Dr. Mensah Otabil’s Interna-
tional Central Gospel Church. Otabil preaches on the Malaysian TV-station
TV3 every Sunday evening, broadcasts his views on Radio Gold every weekday
between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m., and produces and sells a broad range of audio- and
videotapes (de Witte 2003). Other pastors run prayer programs early in the
morning or late at night. If one ®ips through the stations on radio and TV, it is
impossible to miss the programs oriented toward Pentecostalism, from talk
shows to musical stations. And, driving through town, one is struck by the
omnipresence of wall posters and bumper stickers advertising one or another
Pentecostal-Charismatic church or event; some of the bigger churches, such as

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