Nairobi, 21 August, 2019 / 12:39 am (ACI Africa).
Catholic journalists in Africa have been encouraged to facilitate media coverage of Church-related events in Africa, taking seriously their unique responsibility of giving media visibility to happenings on the continent from a faith perspective.
“Our story has always been told by other people,” George Wirnkar, the Africa region manager of EWTN said August 17 in Nairobi, highlighting the tendency to relegate Africa’s stories to secular media channels, which choose to exclude aspects of faith.
“A few months ago, a Kenyan (Franciscan) Brother called Bro. Peter Tabichi was voted the best teacher in the whole world. He had a prize money of one million dollars. I checked CNN, I checked every place, they kept referring to him as Mr. Peter Tabichi,” Mr. Wirnkar explained and continued, “He wore his religious garment at the award ceremony. They insisted on not identifying him as a brother, because of course that was not going to serve their own ends.”
He lamented that the stories published and broadcast about the religious brother Tabichi excluded his background as a consecrated African man belonging to the order of the Franciscans arguing that the commercial interests of secular media do not allow them to give visibility to events from a faith standpoint.
“There is an Igbo proverb which says, until the lion gets its own story teller, all the tales about hunting will glorify the hunter,” Mr. Wirnkar said.
