Business of the Spirit: Ghanaian Broadcast Media and the Commercial Exploitation of Pentecostalism

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JAMS 3 (2) pp. 189–204 Intellect Limited 2011

Journal of African Media Studies Volume 3 Number 2

© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.3.2.189_1

MARLEEN DE WITTEVU University Amsterdam

Business of the Spirit:

Ghanaian broadcast

media and the commercial

exploitation of

Pentecostalism

ABSTRACT

This article takes a critical look at Ghana’s rapidly evolving broadcasting scene and in particular at the expansion and popularity of religious broadcasting. Sketching the developments of the Ghanaian media landscape, it analyses the changing poli-tics of representing religion in this field. The much-celebrated processes of media deregulation and democratization, and the new opportunities for ownership, produc-tion, and participation they entail, have led to a dominance of Pentecostalism in the public sphere. While this development has been analysed from the perspective of churches and pastors, this article explores the intertwinement of commercial media and Pentecostalism from the perspective of a number of private media owners and producers in Accra. Whether these media entrepreneurs are themselves Pentecostal or not, they all have to deal with, and commercially exploit, the power and attrac-tion of Pentecostalism. Their experience that commercial success is hardly possi-ble without Pentecostalism makes clear that the influence of Pentecostalism in the Ghanaian public sphere reaches way beyond media-active pastors and born-again

KEYWORDS

broadcastingmedia deregulationPentecostalismbusinessGhana

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media practitioners, and invites us to rethink the relationship between media, busi-ness and religion.

INTRODUCTION

In practice access to the media is not equal. Because religion has been commercialised, it is about business. But what can the National Media Commission do? It is about the freedom of expression. Religion is not like political parties; we cannot regulate advertisement in that environ-ment. You can’t stop them from using their money the way they want, sponsoring a religious programme or advert is not a crime. So we can do very little about it. But we would wish that the media are used as a platform for national unity and integration rather than causing disaffec-tion and confusion.

When I talked to the former executive secretary of the Ghanaian National Media Commission (NMC), Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafo, he expressed the dilemma encountered by many media professionals in Ghana: that of balancing freedom of expression and equality of access to the media. One and a half decade after the deregulation of the Ghanaian media in the 1990s, media-entrepreneurship has come to be linked to religious business and proselytization to an extent that goes against the very modernist, democratic ideals that informed this deregulation.

Over a relatively short period of time, Ghana’s broadcasting scene has dras-tically changed. Privately owned, commercial FM and TV stations are mush-rooming, especially so in the cities, claiming urban soundscapes from the state-owned Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. Around these new radio and television stations, a whole new entertainment culture has come to evolve, consisting of media personalities, RTV awards, review magazines and live shows. Particularly striking about this new media scene is the abundance of religion on the airwaves. Whereas formerly the state controlled all broadcast media and severely restricted the representation of religion, churches, and Charismatic-Pentecostal ones in particular, have now jumped into the new media spaces, opened up by the liberalization, to exploit their religious, commercial and polit-ical possibilities to the fullest and capture new religious audiences.

Although media legislation in Ghana disallows religious organizations to set up broadcast stations, the new media freedom does allow religious leaders to buy airtime or to appear on programmes. Charismatic-Pentecostal pastors are most eager to do so, and most often have the necessary funds. As a result, the new media scene is characterized by a strong Charismatic-Pentecostal presence. Televised church services, radio sermons and phone-in talk shows, Pentecostalist video movies (Meyer 2004), worship and sermon tapes, popular gospel music and Christian print media inundate public and private spaces, serving a ready market of enthusiastic young Christians. Tuning the radio at any time of the day or zapping through the TV channels on weekday morn-ings, one cannot miss the energetic, Charismatic pastors, who like profes-sional media entertainers preach their convictions and communicate their spiritual powers and miracles to a widespread audience through the airwaves. In the weekends, chains of church services and sermons fill hours of televi-sion time on all TV channels. The banners and posters that decorate many

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of Accra’s walls and bridges and call people to Christian crusades, confer-ences or concerts (Asamoah-Gyadu 2005b) have been joined by radio and TV commercials advertising such events. The transformation of the Ghanaian public sphere has put religion centre stage.

Surprisingly, however, the lively debate in Ghana about media freedom and democratization that accompanies the rise of independent media hardly discusses the role of religion. It was only when probed that the NMC exec-utive addressed religion, and he did so in terms of an anomaly: this is not how it should be. Media professionals, policy-makers and public commenta-tors seem to implicitly reiterate modernist ideas of mass media, civil society and the public sphere that assume the retreat of religion into the realm of the private, and hence leave no place for the possibility of religious forma-tions in the modern public sphere. Although in academic debates seculari-zation theory has come under severe criticism, it is important to realize that the Habermasian ideal of a rational and secular public sphere has become widely accepted and taken for granted by media professionals and civic insti-tutions worldwide. Cast as the goal and principle of modern democracy, it informs public debates in Europe and Africa alike. In practice, however, we witness the opposite of the retreat of religion: in many African countries, including Ghana, media liberalization has enabled new, public manifestations of religion as religious groups assert a powerful and transformative presence in new public spheres. Contrary to normative, secular ideals, religion plays a constitutive role in the ‘modernization’ and ‘democratization’ of the Ghanaian public sphere (cf. Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Hoover and Lundby 1997; Meyer and Moors 2006; Stout and Buddenbaum 1996).

Jürgen Habermas’ pioneering work on the structural transformation of the bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit in western-European societies (1989) has triggered a whole body of critical literature on the notion of the public sphere (see, among others, Asad 2003; Calhoun 1992; Casanova 1994; Mahmood 2004; Meyer and Moors 2006; Warner 1992). Of particular interest here is the collec-tion of essays on religion, media and the public sphere (Meyer and Moors 2006). Critical of Habermas’ eurocentric, rationalist, universalistic and norma-tive account of the transformation of the public sphere, contributors to this volume examine how processes of media liberalization and practices of reli-gious mediation join to transform public spheres into arenas in which religious organizations seek to capture new audiences with spectacular images (Birman 2006; Meyer 2006), compelling sounds (Hirschkind 2006; Schulz 2006) and novel markers of religious authority and authenticity (Stolow 2006; see also Van de Port 2005). The question is how changes in the institutions, econom-ics, technologies and practices of media have changed access to the public sphere, inform strategies of exclusion and inclusion, and contribute to specific ways of being a ‘public’ and specific notions of personhood (see also Warner 1992). Liberalization, commercialization and globalization of media allow new forces, including religious ones, to enter the public sphere and compete for persuading audiences not only on the basis of rational-critical argument, but also through the visceral power of visuals, voice, rhythm and volume.

This article takes a critical look at Ghana’s rapidly evolving media scene and, in particular, at the development and popularity of religious broadcasting. Elsewhere I have analysed this development from the perspective of churches and pastors (De Witte 2003); this article explores the intertwinement of commercial media and Pentecostalism from the perspective of a number of private media owners and producers in Accra. It turns out that the

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transformative power of religion in the public sphere goes much further than the media activity of religious organizations and leaders. Whether these media entrepreneurs are themselves Pentecostal or not, they all have to deal with, and commercially exploit, the power and attraction of Pentecostalism. I argue that the processes of media deregulation and democratization, and the new opportunities for ownership, production and participation they entail, have set the conditions for a ‘Pentecostalization’ of the public sphere (Meyer 2004; cf. Pype 2009) that reaches way beyond media-active, airtime-buying pastors, but includes a broad range of new media entrepreneurs. This development invites us to rethink the relationship between political shifts, changing mediascapes, business strategies and religious movements, and to resist modernist distinctions between these domains.

RELIGION IN A CHANGING MEDIASCAPE

From the introduction of radio in the Gold Coast in 1935 until 1995, radio and from 1965 television were controlled by the colonial and postcolonial state and this greatly shaped media practice. Whereas the various subsequent regimes – colonial, independent, military and civilian – differed much in their use of the media, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) always served a strong political and educational purpose. Throughout the history of GBC, develop-ment of the broadcast infrastructure and programming policies were closely tied to particular state ideologies – colonial, anti-colonial, Panafricanist, revo-lutionary or other – and were seen as a tool for creating the desired citizens. A major concern always was to educate the people and to build a nation.

In colonial times, media ideology stressed education and civilization, and programming served to bind people to the British Commonwealth through news about others parts of the empire, European music and information about colonial state policies. After independence, the processes of nationali-zation, in terms of ownership and programming, and popularization, through the promotion of widely accessible radio technology, served the education of national citizens and the creation of a national identity. As this also implied a nationwide sharing of the same programming, of a collective listening expe-rience, the state thus created shared understandings of past and present events, of inside and outside the nation of Ghana, of morality and immorality. Interestingly, the most authoritarian regimes were also those that invested most in the media infrastructure, clearly inspired by the belief that when you have the media you have the nation. Indeed, most coups started with the seizure of the GBC complex and the new, self-declared regime address-ing the nation through the airwaves. Although today the profusion of private FM and TV stations has drastically changed the media field and undermines the nation-building potential of the media, the belief in the political power of the public media is still strong and up till today the GBC grounds are heavily protected by soldiers and not easily accessible for non-staff.

The state’s concern with control over the means of communication was informed by a strong belief in the power of radio (and later TV) to shape people’s minds. The idea that radio and television serve as transformative forces is still strong in media debates today, as is the implicit theory of reception that assumes audiences to be passive receivers of predetermined messages and hardly leaves room for alternative interactions with media. Media debates and media policy are characterized by an instrumentalist view of media that attributes to media an almost magical power to influence the thinking and

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1. Despite several applications, by the end of 1994 no frequencies had been granted yet for fears that private radio stations would be associated with particular ethnic groups, and thus challenge national unity and possibly subvert public order. On 19 November 1994 ‘Radio Eye’ started test transmissions, but police soon raided the station’s premises, seizing the equipment and arresting the owners and disc jockeys for operating a pirate radio station. In April 1995 ‘JoyFM’ was the first legal private radio station to begin broadcasting in Ghana.

habits of the people. National consciousness and identity, education and social development are all supposed to be largely shaped by the media. This is one of the reasons why, after the return to democracy in 1992, the state found it hard to give up its control over the media and the first private radio station could start operating only in 1995, and not without a struggle.1

With the monopoly over the media and media production, the state also controlled the public representation of religion. Officially, the state extended its policy of religious neutrality to its media policy, but in practice a subtle, implicit link between the state and mainline Christianity informed programmes such as Church Service, the main religious broadcast on ‘GBC-TV’. Although the programme was meant to represent ‘the various Christian churches in Ghana’, it clearly favoured the established mainline churches to the exclusion of independent, ‘spiritual churches’ and Charismatic-Pentecostal churches. African traditional religion was first of all framed as ‘cultural heritage’, and Islam was hardly represented at all. In addition, there was a big difference between the frames in which mainline Christianity and African traditional religion were represented. The TV talk show Cultural Heritage, for example, hosted cultural specialists who elaborated on specific topics like ‘traditional religion’, ‘cultural festivals’ or ‘libation’, meant to educate the people about diverse cultural aspects of the nation, to restore their pride in Ghana’s ‘rich and colourful heritage’ and to promote ‘unity in diversity’. It disseminated knowl-edge about, rather than stimulating participation in, traditional religion and was based on an abstract notion of ‘our nation’. People were to identify with it in a cerebral, almost distanced way as citizens. Church Service was rather intended to ‘promote balanced and mature Christian growth, to bring a life changing transformation and personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ’. This framing promoted involvement and personal identification as believers.

A small opening for Charismatic Pentecostalism appeared when from the late 1970s to 1982 GBC received programme tapes from foreign evangelists such as Oral Roberts and Benson Idahosa (Nigeria) and agreed to air them on national television. Together with ‘small media’ and live crusades, this inspired a wave of Charismatic Christian enthusiasm in Ghana. In December 1981, however, flight lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took power and he was highly suspicious of this new strand of Christianity with its generally negative atti-tude towards traditional culture running counter to the ideals of his ‘cultural revolution’. He thus banned all foreign religious radio and TV programmes from the airwaves. From then on the neo-traditionalist Afrikania Mission, also known as the religious branch of the revolution, was the only religious group granted airspace on state radio and for a long time the airwaves remained inaccessible for any other religious group.

In 1992, presidential elections effectuated a return to democratic rule and the adoption of a constitution that guarantees freedom and independ-ence of the media and forbids censorship and licensing of any media outlet. Gradually, once the fences were down with the birth of ‘JoyFM’ in 1995, the state loosened control over the media, thus giving way to a rapidly evolving private media scene. By 2005 the number of FM radio stations in the country had risen to 60. The public TV channel had been joined by five private TV stations in Accra and Kumasi and a number of cable television providers. The commercial nature of the new broadcast stations has two consequences that are especially relevant for the present discussion. First, airtime slots are sold for privately produced programmes. Access to the airwaves is thus available to those with money, excluding those without. Charismatic churches are the

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keenest buyers. Even GBC sells airtime to churches now, forced by media competition. More than 30 different Christian broadcasts throughout the week fill about 22 hours of airtime on the TV channels in Accra. Some are foreign productions, but most are produced by Ghanaian Charismatic churches that have the resources to pay for airtime.

Second, though broadcasting locally, the commercial stations are much more transnationally oriented than the national GBC used to be, and in many cases establish transnational business links. They air much foreign, especially American entertainment programming, both through buying the rights to old foreign productions at very low cost and through relay agreements with global media networks, including religious ones such as Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Trinity Broadcasting Network and the Catholic Eternal World Television Network. Such foreign programmes provide reference points for local productions. Vice versa, local productions may reach much wider audi-ences throughout Africa through arrangements with stations in other African countries or networks such as the African Broadcast Network. Private radio and television stations thus participate in a global context of broadcasting and generate a globalized entertainment culture that partners well with the equally globalized culture of Charismatic Pentecostalism.

CHARISMATIC PENTECOSTALISM AND MEDIA IN GHANA

In order to better grasp the intertwinement of media production and Pentecostalism in Ghana, and the implications of this intertwinement for new media entrepreneurs, let me briefly introduce Charismatic Pentecostalism and its place in Ghana’s religious and media landscape. As in many sub-Saharan African countries, Ghanaian Charismatic-Pentecostal churches have been booming over the last two decades. In the 1970s the availability of foreign evangelical newsletters, books, cassettes and television programmes and several mass conventions held by foreign itinerant evangelists stimulated a Charismatic revival in Ghana (Asamoah-Gyadu 2005a; Gifford 2004; Larbi 2001). Locally established prayer groups evolved into full-fledged churches that attracted exponentially growing numbers of followers, especially among young educated upwardly mobile people in the urban areas, where almost half of all Christians regard themselves as Charismatic Pentecostal (Ghana Statistical Service 2000). But more than in numbers alone, the impact of this new type of Pentecostal churches lies in the strong public presence they have established. Their extensive media activity attracts broad audiences far beyond their memberships and influences not only other Christian denomi-nations, but also non-Christian religions (De Witte 2005) and popular and political culture.

The doctrines, structures of authority, and ways of worship of these churches fit well with their positive and productive attitude towards mass media. First of all, they place high value on evangelization. Media are seen as effective channels of spreading the gospel of Christ to the masses, visual-izing God’s miracles for an audience outside the churches, and transferring the power of the Holy Spirit to listeners and viewers at home. Emphasizing church growth as evidence of the work of God and as a source of prestige, they parade their high numbers of followers in word and image. In addition, locating religious authority in Charismatic leadership and divine inspiration rather than institutionalized power, they use media to boost the charisma of the leader and manage his public personality (De Witte 2003), thus making

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2. Interview Rev. Cephas Amartey of ‘JoyFM’ in Radio and TV Review 28 (2001): 57.

pastors into media celebrities. The message of these churches evolves around success, achievement, self-making and prosperity. Most use English and have a modern, cosmopolitan and rich outlook. Media and technology are also used to enhance a self-image of success, prosperity and modernity as a sign of God’s blessing. Lastly, the Pentecostal emphasis on the personal experience of the Holy Spirit, emotional expression and dramatic healing and deliverance links up easily with the formats of show and spectacle popular with commer-cialized television.

Most Charismatic churches then have a ‘media ministry’, a church depart-ment that occupies itself entirely with the production, sales and broadcast of radio and/or TV programmes, audio and/or videotapes and CDs, and PR material such as TV commercials. Some have their own fully equipped media production studio and a professional media team. The financial resources needed to produce their own programmes and buy airtime on radio and/or TV derive largely from the churches’ membership. They are rather successful at implementing their doctrine of tithing as well as soliciting other forms of money gifts from their followers, among whom successful executives, busi-nessmen and politicians. Apart from this, Charismatic churches can fairly easily find sponsorship for their broadcasts as their huge popularity makes them commercially interesting, for example for soft drink producers, who see a market in the Pentecostal ban on alcohol.

In Ghana’s commercialized media field, media entrepreneurship and Pentecostalism have become intertwined to the extent that, as the famous radio pastor Rev. Cephas Amartey of ‘JoyFM’ put it, ‘religious broadcast has become the bedrock of the media industry in the country’.2 The impact of these developments, however, reaches much further than religious broadcasts per se. In what follows I present some media professionals and broadcast stations to show how their work intertwines with Charismatic Pentecostalism in Ghana’s new media scene.

NEW MEDIA ENTREPRENEURS

Charismatic media makers – AltarMedia

AltarMedia is the name of the media department of Mensa Otabil’s International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), one of Ghana’s largest and most influential Charismatic churches (De Witte 2003). The name comes from the intention that, as one of the editors puts it, ‘everything that comes from the altar, everything that is preached, is to be commercialised’, in other words, to be made available to the public in a commodity format. This started as a tape ministry right from the birth of the church in 1984, and grew into a professional media production company that serves other client-churches as well. The ICGC has its own editing studio in the church building and invests a lot in professional equipment, to ‘satisfy customer expectation’ and ‘provide excellence’. With five staff members with an educational and professional background in media, as well as a religious commitment to the church, AltarMedia is purely commercial and supposed to – but in practice does not yet – operate (financially) independently of the church. To this end it also hires its equipment and expertise to other churches as well as film producers.

One of the editors is Clifford, who works with AltarMedia from the begin-ning. Trained at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), he used to work with the video company that did the filming and editing for the ICGC.

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3. Conversation 18 April 2002.

He was already an ICGC member then. When AltarMedia was established, he came to work here. Clifford believes God called him to do this work.

You have to determine your personal calling. Personally I, as a media man, believe that God has called me to use the media to spread the gospel. I could have stood in the pulpit, like Otabil. That has even been prophesied to me. But I feel my calling is the media.3

In the studio Clifford works mostly at image editing, but he also works as a cameraman or operates the camera control unit. His colleague Kofi has worked with AltarMedia since 2001. He is in his late 20s and graduated from ‘Tech’ (Kumasi University of Science and Technology) in graphics. Kofi and Clifford’s main job is the production and post-production of Otabil’s Living Word broadcasts and CD’s, but they also make the TV programme Power in his Presence for the Royal House Chapel International, and work on occasional commissions like anniversary videos or TV commercials.

Kofi and Clifford smoothly blended their personal religious conviction with media professionalism and creativity, and a commercial attitude. I was impressed by the professionalism of their format and product development and by the speed with which they caught up with technical developments in the field; they were always working on something new. They also conveyed a strong sense of working and being at home in a global environment of media production and of Charismatic Pentecostalism. Kofi, in particular, was very well versed in the latest technological gadgets in media and communica-tions and in between his work he liked to browse foreign sales catalogues. He loves American ‘cool music’ (jazz and gospel), stored in hundreds of digital music files in his computer, which he liked to play while working, as a source of inspiration. Other sources of inspiration for making Living Word were American televangelists like Benny Hinn, Billy Graham, Morris Cerrulo and Kenneth Hagin, who reach Ghana through Trinity Broadcast Network, available on cable TV. This was certainly not one-way traffic, as their products were exported to and broadcast in other parts of the world, including America and Europe. As AltarMedia manager Bright commented:

That is one of the interesting things about this job. We are sitting here in Africa and using our creativity to produce something for the interna-tional market. We make creative products while there is not even a local market for it.

These are people, then, who put their professional background in media at the service of God, and pursue a career in media production as employees of a Charismatic church.

Christian media owners and directors – ‘JoyFM’, Channel ‘R’, ‘Radio Gold’

Charismatic media strategies are supported by the fact that many of the private FM stations are owned and/or directed by confirmed born-again Christians. Although Ghanaian media law prohibits religiously based radio or TV stations, the personal religious affiliation of the owner or manager greatly influences programming, especially because Christian conviction partners well with commercial interest.

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4. Interview Adjoba Kyerebah, public relations officer ‘JoyFM’, 13 August 2001.

5. Interview Baffou-Bonnie, 10 August 2001.

6. Interview Baffou-Bonnie, 10 August 2001.

The managing director of ‘JoyFM’ is a born-again Christian and a member of the ICGC. That personal religious conviction partners well with business interest is clear from his PRO’s answer to my question whether ‘JoyFM’ was a Christian station.

Yes, it is […] but I don’t want to call it a Christian station. What it is, is that because it is a commercial station, obviously we know what makes commercial sense and I would say that Ghana is a predominantly Christian country and that is what makes commercial sense.4

Another example is ‘Channel “R”’, established in 2001. It is, according to the director, ‘not exactly a religious station in the strict sense of the word’ (Radio and TV Review 28, 2001: 50), and so dodges the law against religious broad-cast stations. Yet, also known as ‘the Channel of Righteousness’, it plays only gospel music, hosts a lot of preachers and has phone-in talk shows where people give testimonies of what Jesus has done in their lives, ‘all geared towards campaigning for the Kingdom of God’. Indeed, the director of ‘Channel “R”’ is born again and his radio station is a response to ‘what the good Lord has done for him when he forgave him his sins and thus won him for his salvation’.

The MD of ‘Radio Gold’, Mr Baffou-Bonnie, broadcasts a lot of Christian programmes. Preaching, live shows from churches, and pastors who come live to the studio. Most is paid for by the churches, but some are aired free of charge, ‘because it is also our duty to promote morality within the community. And therefore if we realise that they cannot pay, we let them preach for free’.5 Baffou-Bonnie gladly admits that this is something personal.

My drift towards sponsoring such religious activities is personal. It is born out of the fact that I am a Christian myself. And I feel that if I die – and I know I am going to heaven – God asks me ‘what did you do when I put you on earth?’ Maybe if I were to be a Muslim, I would be more inclined to do something to promote some Islamic activities.6

Many radio stations also employ pastors or evangelists as part-time present-ers, DJ’s and talk show hosts, independent of their particular church, although most of them are Charismatic. Some have become popular personalities, are interviewed for entertainment magazines, present gospel shows, and are hired by various churches to host or perform on special occasions. These ‘religious celebrities’ are like a fish in water in the new Christian entertainment scene created by radio, TV, media magazines and live gospel shows. Having a popu-lar pastor is also commercially good for the station. And indeed, many media owners who are not born-again Christians do broadcast a lot of Christian programming, just because it is good business.

Religion as business – ‘Metro TV’, ‘TV3’, GBC

‘Metro TV’ is a joint venture between GBC and the international media enter-prise Media1, owned by two Lebanese-Ghanaian brothers. It shows relatively many Islamic programmes, four hours on Fridays, all home-produced. Still, it has a lot more Christian programming and with ten hours a week even more than any other TV station. It has twelve to thirteen churches buying airtime. According to the MD, Fadi Fattal, ‘they are one of the best business relations;

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7. Sankòfa is the name of the Akan symbol of a bird looking back. It translates as ‘go back and take it’.

they pay $ 250–350 per 30 minutes’. He is not interested in or involved with the content; ‘they just bring their tape to be broadcast, they do everything’. Metro also has a broadcasting agreement with the CBN Africa for five hours a week. Interestingly, the station also tries to combine Islam and marketing. During the Muslim festivities of Id al Fitr in 2002, it organized the Metro Rice Festival, a musical show with free meals of rice, sponsored by a rice brand. In this it follows Christian initiatives and formats, but is by far not as successful. Because the institutions of the public sphere are all located in the Christian-dominated South of the country, Islam’s influence on public and popular culture is very limited.

Not all media practitioners are happy with the abundance of church broad-casts on the airwaves. Florence Nyantey, a programme producer of ‘TV3’, the first private free-on-air television station in Ghana to begin commercial broadcasting in 1997, complained that

There is too much religion in the media, it’s terrible, the same church services always, it’s so boring. But, you know, we are a private station. The churches have sponsors from among their members to pay for making the programmes and for airtime. And we need the money.

This market logic governing the new media field has forced GBC to go commercial too and sell airtime to churches (for $300–$450 per 30 minutes), something that did not happen before the liberalization of the media. Other than ‘Metro TV’, however, GBC seeks to regulate the content of religious broadcasts with formalized guidelines.

Non-Christian media practitioners – ‘Crystal TV’, ‘TV Africa’

Of course, Pentecostalism is not only religion represented in the media. I have mentioned ‘Metro TV’s’ Islamic programming. Let me give two other examples of non-Christian media practitioners who also seek to combine their religious conviction with their media work. ‘Crystal TV’ in Kumasi carries a broadcast by the Etherean Mission, a ‘church’ that seeks to combine Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and African traditional religion. The station owner, Mr Crystal, who has himself ‘a tendency towards Hinduism’, was glad about the broad orientation of the Etherean Mission, including Hindu worship, and decided to put their videos on ‘Crystal TV’ for free. Obviously, this is an exception that does not at all tie up with broad popular culture and market logic and the rather intolerant attitude of many Charismatic preachers towards other religion did not stop Mr Crystal from putting them on air.

A similar discrepancy between the non-Christian ideology of the station owner-director and the business value of Pentecostalism can be discerned in ‘TV Africa’. ‘TV Africa’ was founded as a free-on-air station in 1995 and started operating in 2003, with the slogans: ‘“TV Africa”: Truly African, Proudly Ghanaian’ and ‘projecting African values’. The station’s mission to ‘uplift and enhance the soul and image of the African, both on the conti-nent and in the diaspora’ strongly echoes the ideology of Sankofaism that seeks to decolonize the African mind by shedding of European perversion and retrieving African heritage.7 The station’s founder, the celebrated film-maker Kwaw Ansah, indeed comes from the Sankofaist intellectual tradition. What is new about his TV project is the commercial nature of the TV station, and its explicit branding and marketing strategy that targets a particular niche

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8. Quotes from ‘TV Africa’ brochure. This indigenous brand design is visible, for instance, in the set designs, presenter’s dresses and graphics.

9. Interview Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafo, 13 November 2002.

market of ‘those who have an African lifestyle and taste for African prod-ucts’ with a ‘brand [that] has been made to look indigenous’.8 In an interview, Kwaw Ansah told me that a few years ago it would have been impossible to even think of a commercial TV station that put African heritage at the fore-front, such was the general craving for things western and the dislike of things African. Today there appears to be a growing market for things African, espe-cially so among young urban middle-class people, who are looking for new ways to express an ‘African’ identity. And yet, the commercial exploitation of African heritage by a station like ‘TV Africa’ does pose tensions that derive from the strong public influence of Pentecostalism. Kwah Ansah, a member of the Afrikania Mission, is highly critical of Pentecostal churches and their negative attitude towards traditional African culture that goes directly against the mission of the station. Yet, in order to survive as a commercial station, ‘TV Africa’ cannot do without Pentecostal churches buying airtime and thus carries many Pentecostal broadcasts. Similarly, Kwaw Ansah is very critical of the Pentecostally inspired Ghanaian and Nigerian video movies and their tendency to depict African tradition as the realm of dangerous powers (Meyer 2006). But this genre of movies is very popular and attracts large audiences and thus ‘TV Africa’ frequently shows them.

Non-Christian media owners such as Mr Crystal and Kwaw Ansah thus, much like Christian media owners, seek to use their TV station as a chan-nel for propagating their religious or ideological conviction. At the same time, the commercial power of Pentecostalism makes them sell airtime to churches that directly and sometimes aggressively challenge these convictions. This confirms the statement the ‘religious broadcasting has become the bedrock of the media industry in the country’. The churches are keeping the broadcasting stations in business, but by doing so cause tensions for media professionals who do not subscribe to and often strongly criticize Pentecostalism, but do need to operate commercially.

Media watchdogs – the NMC

Not surprisingly, the rapid transition to media deregulation has not gone uncontested, but has generated a lively debate about media, democracy and the role of the state. A variety of voices, participants and institutions have taken part in the negotiation of new media practices. Most media profession-als, civic commentators, and other contributors are optimistic about the mass media’s potential of promoting the liberal democratic principles of openness, pluralism and participation, and fully embrace the international community’s celebration of ‘civil society’ in Africa, including its modernist assumptions. At the same time, the vision of the public sphere as a secular, national space of rational interaction has come under pressure from the marked public pres-ence of religion, and especially Charismatic Pentecostalism. The NMC, an officially independent media watchdog, has therefore felt the urge to develop Broadcasting Standards.

Established by the constitution chiefly as a buffer between the government and the state media, and as a conflict-solving party between the public and the media, generally, the NMC represents ten civic groups. Of the religious groups, there is one representative for ‘the Christian churches’ and one for ‘the Muslims’. Significantly, there is no representative for traditional religion, which, according to the former executive secretary Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafo, is ‘too undefined, too fragmented to be incorporated into this kind of set-up’.9

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10. Since 2004 Nigerian media laws prohibit the broadcasting of ‘unverifiable miracles’.

In reaction to the rapid developments in the media field, which ‘take place without clear guidelines’ and ‘undermine the ethos of broadcasting as a public good’ (NMC, National Media Policy), the commission came up with a National Media Policy and Broadcasting Standards. A quick look at these documents reveals their being hopelessly out of tune with the working practices of the private media in this era of media liberalization, commercialization, globalization and especially ‘Pentecostalization’. The ‘pursuit of dynamic, equitable, and culturally endowed national development’ entails, as stated in the National Media Policy, the use of local languages and the promotion and growth of local culture. A prescribed percentage of 50% for radio and 30% for television airtime (to be risen to 75% and 50%) should be allocated to local content, including music. Half of these percentages are to be aired during prime time, and half also should consist of programmes promoting local education, culture and development. Programming should further contribute to civic education, family life, good governance, human rights and gender justice. The media should ensure that programme content reflects and advances Ghanaian cultural aspirations and values through the use of imagery, symbolism and language that promote national and African cultural heritage, self-identity and self-esteem. The Broadcasting Standards further specify these requirements and include, to pick just a few: ‘avoid all indecency and incitement to ethnic, religious or sectional hatred’; ‘the sanctity of marriage and family values should be promoted’; ‘Ghanaian cultural rites should be promoted with accuracy’; ‘the distinction between truth and fiction should not be blurred’; and ‘undesirable aspects of human nature should not be glamorised’. Concerning religious programmes, the opportunity for religious broadcast should be available to the various religions and under the same conditions; religious broadcasts should be presented by responsible representatives of the religion, should not contain any attack on or ridicule of any other religion, and shall be prepared with due regard and respect for the beliefs and sensibilities of all religions. Rules for commercial advertising include that it is unacceptable for certain professions to advertise, namely physicians, lawyers, dentists, osteopaths, chiropractors, occultists, optometrists and others of a similar nature.

Through such guidelines, the NMC tries to direct the representation of culture, tradition and religion in the media within a common, national framework of morality. In practice, however, these guidelines are subject to different interpretations and hence difficult to implement. Who decides what ‘indecency’ is and what ‘undesirable aspects of human nature’ are? And when we see Charismatic pastors on television healing people from all kinds of sicknesses, delivering them from evil spirits or prophesying riches, who judges whether this is truth or fiction or whether the distinction between the two has become blurred?10 Such terms are simply not applicable to this kind of television programming. Moreover, are those healing pastors not of ‘similar nature’ to ‘occultists’, a very controversial category in itself? Surely, they do advertise their healing powers, that is, their business, and call people to come to their churches. And although airtime is in principle available to all religious groups, financial constraints make it a rather restricted oppor-tunity, excluding in particular those who indeed ‘promote national and African cultural heritage’ or forcing them to link up with churches in order to survive.

Talking to Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafo about these guidelines, it became clear to me how much the NMC is caught between, on the one hand, the freedom

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of religious expression, and on the other, the promotion of respect for all religions.

Christians are able to stand there and say all manner of things about traditional religion. Sometimes it is offensive. Part of what the guide-lines are saying is that people must be circumspect in religion, because religion is so emotional, it is irrational, it defies all manner of thinking. […] The environment is choking for traditional religion.

He acknowledges that the principle of equal access to the media does not work in practice, but there is not so much the NMC can do, because that would undermine the freedom of expression that is guaranteed by the constitution.

While pursuing neo-liberal economic policies and opening up the media sphere for global flows of business, images and ideas, the state and institu-tions such as the NMC thus find themselves empty handed with regard to controlling the public representation of religion.

CONCLUSION

Over the last two decades, relations between the Ghanaian state, the media, religion and commerce have fundamentally shifted. Politics of representa-tion changed with democratization processes, developments in the techno-logical infrastructure, increasing global media flows and the spectacular rise of Charismatic Pentecostalism. In the context of commercialization and religious upsurge the state has lost its grip on the media and faces the problem of how to control media content. From a situation where the state fully controlled the media and gave access to it only to its politically favoured religion, first main-line Christianity and later African traditional religion, this state dominance has now given way to the power of Charismatic churches and of the market, which go together remarkably well. The new political and economic media infrastructure heavily supports Charismatic-Pentecostal media strategies. This type of religion not only mingles with, but helps constitute the business and entertainment culture of the commercial media. So much so that commercial success is hardly possible without Pentecostalism in one or the other form. The role of Charismatic Pentecostalism in the Ghanaian media, then, lies not only in religious programming per se, but in its constitutive and transforma-tive influence on the mediascape and the development of new forms of media and entertainment business. It keeps the media in business.

This is not how Habermas envisioned the modern, democratic public sphere: as a secular space for rational–critical interaction, free from interests of power, geared towards the common good of the nation, and above all set apart from the realm of religion. This is also not how the Ghanaian state envi-sioned the public sphere. The state’s effort to implement a modernist vision of media as entirely independent from religion is most obvious in the media legislation that, contrary to many other African countries, does not allow radio and television stations to be founded on a religious basis. Religious organiza-tions may not own a station (that is, a frequency); they may only be repre-sented in the media according to the democratic principle of equal access. In practice, however, the liberalization of the media has generated a paradoxical blend of religious activity and entrepreneurial pragmatism that sustains both the public presence of Charismatic Christianity and the operation of many broadcasting stations in Ghana. This marked involvement of religion in the

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basic structures of the public sphere is not to be regarded as a return to ‘pre-modern’ forms of interaction, but rather urges us to reconsider the still taken for granted modernist perspective on the public sphere as a secular space. It calls us to take seriously the interplay between business and religion with regard to modern media and their publics.

Habermas lamented the return to the display of personal prestige of public representatives before a mass of consumers as the ‘refeudalization of the public sphere’. For him this meant the end of the bourgeois public sphere, where the public is abstracted from physical, theatrical representa-tion and power interests. Charismatic religious leaders in Ghana derive much of their power from being seen and being heard, from their publicly visible body images and publicly audible voices. They depend not only on spectacular body image and theatrical show, but also on dramatic vocal performance. Having an ear for the stylistic features of sound is particularly important in the context of radio, a medium at least as important and power-ful for Charismatic preachers as television. But also on television, it is the interplay of images and voice that makes (or breaks) the affective power of a pastor’s public presence. This is in no way an instance of ‘refeudalization’; it is part and parcel of present-day globalized media and entertainment busi-ness. Charismatic Pentecostalism appears to fit well into the new commercial public culture characterized by personality creation, spectacle and dramati-zation. I would suggest that the affinity between this type of religion and commerce, and the success of their joint venture, lies in that both thrive not so much on persuasion through rational–critical argument, but through splen-did imagery and impressive sound, through affect, emotion and charisma. The ‘Pentecostalization’ of Ghana’s public sphere, then, calls us to take into account the affective, aesthetic dimensions of the public sphere and of mass media in particular.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A draft of this paper was presented at the Third European Conference on African Studies, Leipzig, 4–7 June 2009. I thank the organizers of the panel ‘Changing Mediascapes and New Media Entrepreneurs in Africa’, Tilo Grätz and Birgit Meyer, and the panel members and audience for their stimulating comments. Material for this paper was gathered during fieldwork in Ghana from July to September 2001 and from March 2002 to March 2003. The research was carried out within the framework of the PIONIER research programme ‘Modern mass media, religion, and the imagination of communities’ at the University of Amsterdam (http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/media-religion), and sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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SUGGESTED CITATION

Witte, M. D. (2011), ‘Business of the Spirit: Ghanaian broadcast media and the commercial exploitation of Pentecostalism’, Journal of African Media Studies 3: 2, pp. 189–204, doi: 10.1386/jams.3.2.189_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Marleen de Witte (Ph.D., 2008) is a post-doctoral researcher at the VU University Amsterdam. Her research interests include religion and media, cultural heritage, funerals, popular culture and Ghana/Africa. She has published Long Live the Dead! Changing Funeral Celebrations in Asante, Ghana (Aksant, 2001) and many articles and chapters in international journals and volumes.

Contact: Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.E-mail: [email protected]

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Business of the Spirit: Ghanaian Broadcast Media and the Commercial Exploitation of Pentecostalism

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