Center for Global Islamic Studies

Arguably the most profound change taking place in Africa is neither political nor economic but socioreligious. In the last three decades following the liberalisation and deregulation of the media market, media have lent themselves to a new regime of religious identity never before witnessed. The real “Africa Rising” narrative is not how or about Africa and Africans being economically better off during this period but how Africans have mobilised a new array of media forms and platforms to perform and rearticulate both self and the sacred in ways that both astonish and intrigue, educate and frighten, enrapt and disconcert, mobilise and demoralise. The intersection of new forms of being religious and media has produced both sacred surplus and extreme or excessive religiosity that are reshaping our understanding of the continent, religion and media in the 21st century. A different way of being religious and being in the world, even if from the fringes, is slowly but readily assuming a degree of discernible prominence in different parts of Africa. In this paper, examples will be drawn from southern Africa where a new crop of religious entrepreneurs has emerged deftly mobilising the media in new ways to re(de)fine the contours of sacred surplus in rapidly shifting sociocultural, economic, and political contexts.