AFRICANEWS

Africa

Church press is shallow and boring

What is killing the Christian press in Africa? Our correspondent gives some thought-provoking reasons why the African Christian press landscape is so distraught.

"Due to financial constraints and restructuring, the Kenya Episcopal Conference Executive Board has temporarily suspended the publication of Mwananchi, effective May 1997, until further notice".

The laconic note to the subscribers of Mwananchi, a monthly Catholic magazine, announces the temporary, I hope, disappearance from the market of another Christian publication. Not long ago, Target, published by the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) had also to close.

Only a few days earlier, I read in the CAMECO Newsletter a short paragraph on the overall state of the Catholic press in Africa. CAMECO is short for Catholic Media Council, a Germany-based media consultancy/agency. Under the headline "Africa", it says:
"The situation of the Catholic press (newspapers, magazines) is rather disquieting: even if there was no closure of titles during 1996, most of the Catholic magazines and newspapers we know of, had to face numerous problems. We were directly confronted with the questions through the evaluation of the Catholic magazines produced in Kenya, conducted in August by a team of three African professionals. They recommended that the various Catholic magazines in Kenya join efforts, share facilities and human resources and collaborate on very concrete points (distribution, promotion, advertising) with a view to dealing and competing with the present print media landscape of the country, to offer attractive and relevant Catholic magazines to the public. One great problem in Kenya is the variety of Catholic publications which largely overlap with each other."

Personally, I do not agree with the last opinion. The existing Kenyan Catholic magazines cater for different tastes. To be very generous, all Catholic magazines together, including Mwananchi, reach a monthly circulation of not more than 20,000 copies. "This in a country with a Catholic population of about nine million people, in a country where the daily newspapers sell over 300.000 copies, is an extremely low figure." The problem cannot be in the variety of Catholic publications. It is definitely somewhere else.

Why don't Kenyans buy church press? A number of problems easily come to mind: lack of reading habits among Kenyan churchgoers; low levels of incomes and literacy. But a magazine which wants to sell must first look internally at its own possible shortcomings such as:

• Is the publication professionally written and presented? In a society where the quality of the media products is constantly improving , one cannot afford to be sloppy.
• Is the publication providing topics that are relevant and interesting to its readers? A mere presentation of Christian doctrine could be good for a catechetical aid - and not necessarily for a periodical.
• Is the magazine a source of open and the latest information on the life of the Church? (which, obviously, includes all Christians and not just the bishops, priests and sisters)? A presentation that, even from the pictorial side, gives prevalence to one small part of the people of God, will turn off all the others. In the end, that might make them feel they are not really members of the Church.
• Is the magazine promoting a healthy public opinion in the church, making Christians feel they have the "true freedom to express their ideas based on charity and faith" as the Vatican document Communio et Progressio says?

One could ask many such questions. The great majority of the readers do not go through a sophisticated process of evaluation as the professionals appointed by CAMECO did. Simply, when they perceive that the answers to the above questions are negative, they find the magazine boring, and stop buying and reading it.

This is aggravated by a long standing mistrust between the hierarchy and the press. Clerics tend to see the press as being at the service of the official truth rather than as an instrument immersed in all the uncertainties, struggles and search of the daily living. The reaction of the journalists faced with such a situation was bluntly expressed in the Europe of 1940 by the eminent Catholic writer, George Berninos: "It seems that for every Catholic, there is only one perfectly legitimate activity - without risk of overdoing it - the apology of the ecclesiastical authority and of its methods; the fanatic exaltation of its small successes; the concealment of its failures, even at the cost of shameful lies".

The situation has vastly improved, due to some enlightened church leadership. For instance, the then well-known Cardinal Konig, Arch-bishop of Vienna, in 1965 could say: "If the Catholic journalists have something to say, they must not always wait for the word of the bishop or the news from Rome. Through them, the church speaks to the world, and the world speaks to the church. They are instruments of dialogue".

Now the faithful, more and more accustomed to the free style of the secular media, have developed a taste for dialogue and responsibility. Not many church leaders, though, would be ready to trust the journalists as Cardinal Konig did.

Yet mass media offer an open frontier for the Church to present - amidst much noise and ephemeral seductions - the only Word that truly saves. Christian newspapers, magazines and broadcasting stations have a role to play, but they can only reach a small part of the public: The real game is played in the commercial media, where professionally outstanding Christians can have the chance to be present.

Christian communication is not only spreading information, exchanging ideas, presenting the Gospel values and the teachings of the Church. These dimensions are important, but the cardinal purpose of communication is to make Christ's presence visible in today's world. It is to uncover God's action and to co-operate with it.

The real tools of Christian communicators are faith and creativity rather than computers, recorders and cameras. There is a need to communicate compelling visions and images able to nourish the souls of our always-changing culture. Modern Africans cannot avoid the eternal question: "Does God exist? And, if God exists, how is God present in human history?"

Turning this question and the search for an answer into a challenging and engaging newspaper article or TV programme, is no easy task. It requires a profound personal spiritual experience, professionalism, immersion into the cultural environment of the audience, and bold imagination - features that all too often are sadly missing in the Christian media.

In contrast to the CAMECO evaluation, I tend to think that what kills the Church press in Africa is not its "variety": it is boring uniformity.

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