Christian religious radio production in Benin: The case of Radio Maranatha

Abstract

The author focuses on a Christian broadcaster in Parakou, northern Benin, and analyses its main production structures, its programming, and the actors and their motives involved. It demonstrates how religious media, themselves an assemblage of institutions, actors, significations and infrastructures, participate in consituting the religious domain. Religious culture in Parakou and, more generally, in Benin is not dictated by religious authorities alone: it is made by pastors, lay presenters and their listeners – especially when they participate in interactive radio shows, or join a listeners’ club. Both producers and listeners find new avenues to live their faith. Radio producers and their listeners occupy new spaces to live their faith and gain new media experiences to valorise their skills and knowledge, as well as to experience themselves as part of a larger religious community.