To God Be the Glory! Home Videos, Art Symbology and Religio-Cultural Identity in contemporary African Christianity

Afe Adogame, PhD
The University of Edinburgh

In the last decades, media texts are increasingly serving as one of the significant maps through which African new religious movements discern themselves on local-global religious landscapes. There has been an unprecedented upsurge in the production, consumption and commodification of home video films as one specific form of popular culture in Africa and the new African Diaspora. Nigeria video films, a phenomenon barely a decade old, are now believed to be produced at a rate of nearly one a day. These video genres perhaps offer one of the most formidable and accessible expression of contemporary Nigerian popular culture. Home-video technology represents a basic instance of the interconnectedness of the global and the local on the level of cultural marketing, as well as form part of the processes of African modernity. This paper explores how versions of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity are increasingly engaging religious video technology, as conduits for the dissemination of their religious ideologies; as a means of developing new visual publics, and as a channel towards negotiating old and new identities. It assesses how and to what extent these alternative strategies impact on old and the new emerging publics within Africa and beyond.