Historical Routes Towards Religious Television Fiction in Post-Mobutu Kinshasa

Since the early 1990s Pentecostal-Charismatic Church membership has grown spectacularly in Africa. Scholars of these churches (which are sometimes also called Pentecostalist or Born-Again Churches) invariably mention how audiovisual media are used both in church gatherings and in the proselytising activities of their members. (...) Revisiting the colonial past and taking into account the interfaces of religion and visual media before the heydays of Pentecostalism will, as I hope, contribute to our understandings of how Pentecostalist leaders have been drawn to capture mass media. I attempt to illustrate this with material about Kinshasa's media history. (...) Through considering an outline of the origins of Kinshasa's evangelising serials, it will become clear that the Christian design of Kinshasa's post-millennial Pentecostalist telenarratives is not at all a 'new' phenomenon. Yet, the apocalyptic content of the serials is something peculiar.status: publishe