Mediare le religioni africane: il caso del Pentecostalismo

Every religion needs to be mediated through effective communication tools in order to reach its audience and to create a community sharing the same system of meanings and values. In the last century, communication systems have evolved dramatically in Africa, deeply affecting the context of religious practices as any other social domain. African religions were traditionally mediated through oral and ritual devices, in a communication system that is very different from the written one. The arrival of the ‘religions of the Book’ (which spread in different periods throughout the whole continent) introduced a new powerful medium — the sacred Book — creating a new cultural environment and producing a revolution in religious practices. But even if Islamization and Evangelization have been successful in converting Africans, a certain discomfort remained toward the written medium and the liturgy connected to it, generally perceived as cold and emotionally poor. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a movement of Africanization of Christianity started, giving rise to different African Independent churches. Connected with this phenomenon, Pentecostalism took off in the last decades, quickly becoming a mass religion, thanks also to the extensive use of new audiovisual media. This last evolution goes back to the oral and mimetic devices of traditional religions, translating them into the different genres of audiovisual communication without recourse to writing.