Martin Jumbam
In their recent message from the 2nd Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Africa, that held in Rome from the 4th to the 25th of October 2009, the Synodal Fathers note, with great delight, that there is “a veritable explosion of Catholic radio stations in Africa, from only about 15 in 1994 to over 163 today in 32 nations.” They then strongly urge the Catholic Church in “those nations, which still have reservations in this regard, to review their policies, for the good of their nations and people.”
Up until now, Catholic radio stations have been few and far between, the best known being Radio Reine in Yaoundé and Radio Veritas, the radio of the Catholic Archdiocese of Douala. Whereas Radio Reine is said to be the private property of a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Yaoundé, Radio Veritas, for its part, is the creation of the previous occupant of the Metropolitan See of Douala, His Eminence Christian Cardinal Tumi, today the Archbishop Emeritus.
Rome endorses radio
That it is only now that the Catholic Church in Africa, as a whole, and in Cameroon, in particular, is beginning to fully embrace social communication, notably the radio, as a vibrant tool for evangelisation is somewhat surprising given that the Fathers of the Church have always encouraged local Churches to make extensive use of all available means of social communication to spread Christ’s Word. The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, for example, issued a decree entitled “Inter Mirifica”, which the Servant of God, Pope Paul VI, promulgated in 1963, urging the Church to make extensive use of the available means of mass communication to spread the Gospel to an increasingly secular world.
Pope Paul VI so valued the means of social communication that he openly declared that the Church “would be guilty before the Lord if she did not utilize these powerful means” to proclaim God’s Word (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, No 35). This message was later expressed, with even greater urgency, by his successor, Pope John Paul II, a media man, par excellence, for whom the world of communication was “the first Areopagus of modern times”, the Areopagus being the square in central Athens where Saint Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, is said to have preached the Good News of Christ’s salvation to the Athenians, during one of his missionary journeys, in a language the ordinary person could understand. John Paul II praised the means of social communications for their ability to unify humanity and transform it into a global village’ (Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, No. 37 ).
John Paul II, who never missed an occasion to exhort Catholic media practitioners to make maximum use of these means of social communication, always used his yearly messages on World Communication Day (May 4) to encourage the Church not to be afraid of new technologies. “Catholics should not be afraid to throw open the doors of social communication to Christ, so that the Good News may be heard from the housetops of the world,” (35th World Communication Day, May 27, 2001). He also urged Catholic media practitioners to cast their net deep into the Internet, which he considered a world of its own in dire need of evangelization.
His successor, Benedict XVI, whom few had thought would take the means of social communication as seriously as his predecessor, has even gone further by reaching out, especially to the youth in the medium they all so cherish and use so extensively, that is, the Internet (Facebook, Twitter, etc). Like his predecessor, Benedict XVI has used his messages on World communication Day to exhort the Church to make maximum use of the means of social communication to spread Christ’s message to humanity.
About a year ago (February 17, 2009), Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Director of the Vatican Press Office, told the annual meeting of the Communications Commission of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, that “today there is a great number of people who are not reached directly by the message of the Church, but who can be reached through the media, so that it is our precise duty to try to use this way, even more so these ways – because they are many and varied – for the proclamation of the Gospel.”
It is therefore admirable that the Bishops of the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda have heeded the call of the Synodal Fathers and have decided to create Radio Evangeliium to spread the Gospel. Before them, the Archbishop Emeritus of Douala, His Eminence Christian Tumi, had taken the bold step to endow his Archdiocese with a radio station. I happened to be one of those who played the ‘midwife’ during the ‘delivery’ of Radio Veritas, and it was a difficult delivery, to put it mildly
Radio Veritas, a difficult delivery
His Eminence Cardinal Tumi has extensively discussed this issue of the creation of Radio Veritas in his readable book The Political Regimes of Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, and Christian Tumi, Priest. What I am writing here are just a few facts I gathered as a privileged observer and collaborator of the Archbishop at that particular moment in the history of our Archdiocese. The authoritative voice on this issue remains, of course, that of His Eminence Cardinal Tumi.
Back in the late 90s or early 2000, Cardinal Tumi convened a diocesan synod to discuss John Paul II’s Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Ecclesia in Africa, the document the Holy Father signed in Yaoundé in 1995. As an aside, history has recorded this document as the only one of its kind ever to have been signed by a reigning Supreme Pontiff outside the Vatican.
The purpose of the said diocesan synod was to enable the clergy and selected members of Christ’s faithful to reflect and come up with recommendations on how to implement that papal document within the context of our local Church. I was part of the commission on social communication.
At the end of the discussions, the commission on social communication strongly recommended that our Archbishop equip our Archdiocese with a radio station, for a start, and a television station later. To many of us, however, our recommendation was mere wishful thinking. We completely shelved the proposal when Cardinal Tumi, in his usual jovial manner, later asked us where we thought he was going to get money from for a radio and television station. “Gone are the days when Rome gave us money for things like these; they are considered more a luxury than a necessity.” To us, that was the end of the story.
Cardinal Tumi approves radio creation
Great then was our surprise when a few months later, Cardinal Tumi returned from a visit to Rome to inform us that he had succeeded to get a transmitter for a radio station. As news went round that our Archdiocese would soon have a radio station, excitement gripped everyone, especially us, journalists and technicians.
It was not long thereafter that we all began to realize that there was much more to creating and running a radio station than met the eye. It was the first time this type of technical work was being undertaken in our Archdiocese, and quite a few, sometimes very costly, mistakes were made. For example, technicians of all shades and colour popped up from nowhere, each claiming they could deliver this or that product at the most competitive rate; but once money changed hands, some of them simply melted into the surrounding bushes and were never heard of again. Some supplied spare parts, that were already visibly used, but claimed they were new. Some said they were even ready to swear their honesty on the Bible, before God and man.
Gradually, the physical structures of the radio station became visible to the naked eye – studios, antenna, transmitters, etc. Away from public eye, the administrative work was also going on. An application file was prepared requesting authorisation from the Ministry of Communications to start broadcasting. To ensure that the application documents did not develop legs and disappear in the wrong quarters, Cardinal Tumi personally and wisely entrusted them to the care of a priest working in Yaoundé. The documents being in the hands of a priest, we thought we could breathe easier, thinking that they were in safe hands. How wrong we were!
The Tumi/Ndongo standoff
Months of waiting for a head nod from Yaoundé soon turned to a year and two years were coming up without any reaction from the powers-that-be. Finally, the technicians convinced the Archbishop that the transmitter and other sensitive equipment would soon gather dust and rust and could be damaged. They asked him to authorize them to test-run the equipment just to make sure that they did not break down for want of use.
The Cardinal gave a nod to their technical recommendations. I remember the excitement in the studios one morning when, for the first time ever, the first musical notes from Radio Veritas oozed out into the airwaves of the city of Douala. This was accompanied shortly thereafter by Father Gabriel Samba, OP, the Managing Director of Radio Veritas, who welcomed listeners and informed the world that the voice of the Catholic Church that is in Douala was being heard for the first time on Radio Veritas on an experimental basis on FM 101.5.
We had a small transistor radio through which we monitored the sound quality going out to our listeners. We all jumped up in joy as the first soothing sounds of Christian music poured out into the city of Douala, announcing the arrival of a different type of radio, one that would enable its listeners to hear God’s Word, not in the cacophony of riotous noise the other radio stations were pumping into the airwaves of the city, but rather in a soft breeze of soothing sound and angelic voices. We were telling the inhabitants of Douala, and beyond, that God’s voice is heard more in a gentle breeze than in a storm or earthquake (1 Kg 19:12).
Unfortunately, Radio Veritas did not experiment its broadcast for long before the then Communications Minister, Professor Jacques Fame Ndongo, imposed an interdict on it, calling it a clandestine radio station. Cardinal Tumi was summoned to the Littoral Governor’s office and given the Minister’s order. We waited with bated breath to know what the Cardinal’s reaction would be. In hushed tones, we all prayed for him to defy the Minister’s orders so we could keep broadcasting. But, as soon as he received the written order from the Minister, Cardinal Tumi ordered that we immediately cease broadcasting.
Sadness settled in the newsroom as our technicians reluctantly switched off the sound. In fact, we felt quite frustrated and angry that Cardinal Tumi had given in so quickly to the Minister’s order. In fact, the national press was already vibrating with the news and everyone expected a confrontation between the Archbishop and the Minister, the two men having already clashed in the past in a confrontation the echoes of which were heard around the world. Newspaper speculations ran amok and newspaper sales quadrupled as newsrooms bustled with excitement over what was being already dubbed as the second Tumi/Ndongo battle that was bound to send sparks flying.
Silent diplomacy wins the day.
Internally, some of us were ready to revolt against the Archbishop’s decision and were only held back by the man’s imposing presence and his intimidating height. As the dust began to settle, we began to hear that the Minister was not as wrong as we had thought. In fact, it would seem the priest to whom the Cardinal had entrusted the application filed had, somehow “forgotten” to hand them over to the authorities that be. Why he “forgot” to forward such an important document from his bishop to the ministry has never been made public to some of us. .
As we fumed over the banning of our radio station, we did not know that Cardinal Tumi had settled for a much quieter diplomacy approach. He decided to write directly to the Head of State, President Paul Biya himself, who gave a favourable head nod to the Cardinal’s request. The authorization to reopen Radio Veritas took us completely by surprise.
The first major event covered by Radio Veritas was the Cardinal’s Christmas mid-night Mass 2005. The congregation only became aware of the presence of Radio Veritas at the end of the Mass when the Cardinal pointed to us at one corner of the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral and informed the congregation their Mass had gone out live on Radio Veritas to the city of Douala. The applause from the congregation was truly deafening. Cardinal Tumi then briefly recounted the tribulations of Radio Veritas, which were no longer news to the excited congregation and, before God’s people assembled in his Cathedral, he sent a special word of thanks to the Head of State for authorizing him to run a diocesan radio, a radio of evangelization.
The radio is a financial guzzler
Radio Veritas came onstream in 2005 during my tour of duty as the General Manager of the diocesan printing press, better known by its French acronym MACACOS (Maison Catholique de la Communication Sociale). It soon became evident to us that running a diocesan radio was no small business, financially-speaking, that is. Our authorization as a radio of evangelization did not permit us to make any money through advertisement. Unlike the other commercially-oriented radio stations in the city, Radio Veritas had to be entirely funded by the Archdiocese of Douala, with very little coming in from the few announcements of a mainly Christian nature we were allowed to make.
Everything had to be bought or paid for: there were the personnel (journalists and technicians) to recruit and pay, and delicate and high-tech equipment to buy to keep the radio on the air. The Archbishop, realizing what a huge financial drain the radio was becoming to the diocesan budget, quickly dropped it, like a hot potato, into my hands in my capacity as the General Manager of MACACOS, the financial venture of the Archdiocese.
We soon realized that it was not easy even for a money-making venture, like MACACOS, to easily absorb the diocesan radio. The legal impediments had to be cleared before it could come fully under the wings of MACACOS. Lawyers, seeing a juicy soya at the end of the stick, began to parade in and out of my office, each bringing in his/her brief-case elaborate and mind-boggling plans. No sooner had we received the proposed plans, than their authors were already dropping a bill on my lap, sometimes running into seven digits, for their services.
Before MACACOS could officially and legally absorb Radio Veritas as an integral part of its operations, lawyers and other legal ‘experts’ had made off with quite a chunk of bread from us. I recall how shocked the MACACOS board members were when they saw the dramatic drop in our earnings at the end of the year. Some smelling a financial rat, kept me on my toes for hours with questions concerning the downward curve of the financial earnings that year relative to the previous. Even when it became evident that the radio was the culprit, I still had suspicious eyes being turned in my direction. Mercifully, the figures vindicated my team and me.
As I mentioned earlier, running a diocesan radio is a capital-intensive business. A Christian radio only consumes, and brings in very little in way of financial resources. We are allowed to use 10% of our air time to make short announcements. This is not enough to earn the radio financial resources to keep it on the air. In fact, we usually receive announcements of a mainly religious nature from our parishes. Even though we charge a meager five hundred francs CFA per announcement, some priests still find that we are too expensive! They want their announcements read on the air for free. Imagine that!
Training is capital
Not long after the radio went onstream, we found ourselves confronting another difficulty. We became aware that the radio was not only the high-tech equipment that cost us quite a fortune. Our personnel too proved costly, not only in terms of salary, which was not on the low side -- far from it -- but also in terms of training. It became evident that if we wanted good Catholic journalists, we had to train them ourselves. The schools of journalism sent us young men and women to whom they had given the basic notions of journalism. The onus to make Catholic journalists out of them fell squarely on our shoulders. The first time we listened to them cover the Holy Mass, for example, we nearly collapsed. Their vocabulary and expressions had nothing Catholic in them at all. The Cardinal was scandalized to hear one of them calling the Cathedral, ‘a crowded hall’ with people waiting for the Mass to begin! Another one called the Cardinal’s mitre ‘a hat’; and his crozier, a ‘waka’ stick!
With the Archbishop’s approval, we began to organize a series of training workshops for them, in English and French. We brought in priests to groom them on the use of Catholic terminology, particularly relating to the Mass. Monsignor Paul Nyaga, the Vicar General, enlightened them on how to address Church officials (the Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests), in speech and in writing. We held one training workshop in collaboration with Cameroon Panorama, with the then Editor-in-Chief, Father Moses Tazoh, sharing his experiences with the young journalists. It was costly, in financial terms, but remarkably effective in terms of improved delivery on the air.
Collaboration among Catholic radio stations
Radio Evangeliium, Divine Mercy radio and other Catholic radio stations should start giving serious thought to collaborating among themselves as well as with other Catholic radio stations, either in terms of program exchanges or in the formation of their staff (journalists and technicians alike).
A few years ago, Father Gabriel Samba, OP, the Managing Director of Radio Veritas and I proposed to some officials of a Catholic radio station in Yaoundé to collaborate with Radio Veritas in certain fields. We suggested that they could relay some programs from Radio Veritas and vice versa. We cited the case of one of our popular morning programs, the “Press Review.” We told them that since MACACOS prints a good number of newspapers, Radio Veritas has access to them before anyone else and is thus best placed to make a good review of them. We suggested they could simply relay Radio Veritas in the morning. Unfortunately, no one seemed interested.
Collaboration, not competition, must be what all Catholic radio stations should strive for in this highly competitive environment. I am comforted in this regard by Father Federico Lombardi, SJ, cited earlier, when he says that “… one must seek, in the respective countries, the most effective ways of collaboration in the field of social communications, to guarantee at the same time the vitality of the local communication and the wider dimension, which gives the sense of the universality and union of the universal church.” As a concrete example, he mentions the case of France where diocesan radios are united in a network at the national level, called RCF (Radios Chretienne de France).
In addition to retransmitting programs from Vatican Radio and radio stations from this French network, as Radio Veritas does, our diocesan radio stations could perhaps borrow programs from other African Catholic radio stations. How about going to next door Nigeria and entering into partnership agreements with Catholic radio stations in that country and exchanging programs with them? Just a thought.
Collaboration with other Christian radio stations.
Collaboration can, and should, go beyond collaboration among Catholic radio stations in our country. In 1989, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications published a pamphlet entitled “Criteria for Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Cooperation in Communications.” In it, the authors urge collaboration with the other denominations in the field of mass communications as a way of ensuring “a united religious presence in the very heart of mass communications.”
They then call for “reciprocal participation of Catholic communicators in the communications initiatives of other Churches and Christian communities, and of other Christians in Catholic projects.” They, however, caution that such joint initiatives should only be for the purpose of allowing “Christians to give a common witness to Christ.” Care should, however, be taken not “to weaken the authenticity of the Christian and ecclesial message, or to limit any specifically Catholic initiative” (p.6). They urge Catholic communicators to “provide fair and objective information on other religions of humanity” (p. 10).
This reminds me of a workshop on social communication that some Christian churches organized a few years ago at the Paul VI Memorial Pastoral Center in Mendankwe, Bamenda. I happened by chance to be around. Unfortunately, there was no Catholic presence at that three-day workshop. I asked the organizing secretary, a Baptist missionary, why the Catholics were left out and he assured me that an invitation had been sent to the communication service of the Archdiocese of Bamenda, and that they themselves were rather sad that no one had answered present. When I later contacted some members of the Catholic Communications Service about their absence from that workshop, they did not seem to think that they had missed much by not being there. But, from what I could gather as an outsider, much that was useful was discussed at that workshop, including ecumenical collaboration among the participating churches. I thought an opportunity to make the Catholic voice heard in that forum had been lost, unfortunately.
Conclusion
Let me say, in conclusion, that I am delighted to applaud with the Synodal Fathers this “veritable explosion" of Catholic radio stations in Africa since the First Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Africa in 1994. I am happy that the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda is at the forefront of the creation of Catholic radio stations in Cameroon. Without being asked, I have taken upon myself the audacity to share my personal experiences as a privileged witness to the creation of Radio Veritas in Douala, a radio station of evangelisation that has become a source of reference for many people, not only in the city of Douala, but far beyond. Hopefully, the Bishops of the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda, and those they have appointed to head the new radio stations in their Province, can benefit from the experiences of a radio, like Radio Veritas, for the greater glory of God Almighty. Amen.
Comments