The “sacred significance” of mass communication was clear, stated Malawian theologian Patrick Kalilombe in 1973 at the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation, Zambia. Both sections of the Christian cross, he continued, were needed to achieve “authentic and full communication,” the vertical line representing communion with God and the horizontal line communication among humans. Kalilombe considered the two inseparable, meaning that all aspects of human communication were the concern of the church. Technologies like radio, television, and satellites should be looked to as “gifts from God” and Jesus Christ as the “perfect communicator.” Kalilombe was outlining the key tenets of communication theology, an (ongoing) attempt to bring coherence to reflections on the interaction between Christian theology and the world of communications.Footnote 1 During the previous decade, Catholic and Protestant organizations across the world had worked to establish positions on the politics of information and communication, amid a sea change in both communications theory and Christian thought, as each looked to, and were transformed by, the decolonizing world. In early 1970s East Africa, communication theology witnessed its zenith.
This article charts the intellectual development, application, and reception of communication theology in the 1960s–1980s. It does so through the histories of two little-studied church-led institutions that trained East African journalists and communicators: Nyegezi Social Training Centre near Mwanza, present-day Tanzania, founded by the Catholic White Fathers in 1960, and the Communications Training Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, overseen by the ecumenical All African Council of Churches (AACC) from 1963.Footnote 2 These are not incidental case studies where theological ideas played out. Rather, I argue, they were a fundamental part of the context in which communication theology was produced and refined. These institutions are also key to understanding the historical and historiographical significance of communication theology—a significance that belies its relative obscurity and limited theological reach.Footnote 3
This significance concerns two vibrant and growing areas of scholarship in intellectual history. First, historians of Christian thought have recently brought into view the extent to which Christianity was “remade” by the process of postwar decolonization.Footnote 4 While many postwar Christian leaders in Europe feared a global decline of faith and secularization of society (especially, but not only, under the guise of Cold War communism), Christian clergy, laypeople, and theologians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America reinvented their faith for a changing world.Footnote 5 Christianity’s center of gravity shifted decisively southward. Despite apprehension in sections of church hierarchies, decolonization could thus be embraced as a defense against secularization—or a route to a desirable secularization.Footnote 6 This happened in particular through an ecumenical movement with roots in Protestant missionaries, institutionalized with the foundation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948 and further empowered by increasing involvement of the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council (1962–5).Footnote 7
A key domain for the unfolding of this process, this article suggests, was that of communications, namely journalism training. For reformist Christian leaders, theological renewal after decolonization could be realized by training East African men and women who would interact with non-Christians through the media. This would allow for an emphasis on contextual theology, a reach into secular society, and a prioritization of the experiences of the marginalized poor—all key to the reformist theological agenda. By situating institutional work alongside theological texts, I argue that training centers allowed communication theology to take shape—precisely because of this commitment to contextual theology. The thought and practice of East African theologians, clergy, lay trainers, and trainees, especially from the 1970s onwards, are thus an integral part of the intellectual history of communication theology. In particular, telling the story through East Africa reveals tensions at the heart of this theological agenda. While many tenets of communication theology found traction in the newly independent states of Kenya and Tanzania, continuities from colonial-era missions met with a political and institutional desire for more radical change, and an unsettled relationship between state and church.
The second body of literature to which this article speaks is the recent reappraisal of demands to reform global flows of information and communication in the era of decolonization, notably through the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). NWICO emerged in the mid-1970s, in parallel to the better-known New International Economic Order, framing its intervention in secular terms and working through the apparatus of international organizations such as UNESCO and the nonaligned movement. It was, as one observer put it, “an attempt to sloganize in UNese a varied programme of urgent reforms in the information sector.”Footnote 8 NWICO’s proponents—scholars, journalists, and officials representing nonaligned and newly independent states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—called for “fair flow” of information, as opposed to Western liberal, market-oriented “free flow.” This would mean an end to Western news agencies’ monopoly over news circulation, as well as reforms to global telecommunications infrastructure that preserved the political, economic, and cultural interests of (former) colonial powers.Footnote 9 NWICO was conventionally judged a failure: the long-debated and watered-down program issued by UNESCO, known as the MacBride report, was viewed by critics as a triumph of state authoritarianism over press freedom.Footnote 10
Recent scholarship, however, has challenged the notion that NWICO’s short life span was dictated by inherent ideological contradictions, unearthing a much broader intellectual history. As Sarah Nelson has shown, NWICO was just one episode in a series of demands for equality in global telecommunications.Footnote 11 Ideas that coalesced around NWICO found other outlets, in alternative news collaborations, grassroots journalism, or scholarly fields like communication for development.Footnote 12 In short, an intellectual history of the decolonization of communication requires a view geographically and chronologically broader than its manifestation in conference halls, notably to spaces in the decolonizing world that were the intended beneficiaries of a new information order.
When looking from East Africa, the significance of Christianity in communications debates is unavoidable: the institutions in Nyegezi and Nairobi were the first in the region to offer permanent courses in journalism and audiovisual media respectively, yet they have received scant scholarly attention. NWICO’s own insistence on the state as the liberatory vehicle of global communications has translated into a scholarly assumption that church-led institutions could not contribute radical ideas to the debate around the decolonization of information. In East Africa, I argue, they did. This will come as no surprise to historians of East Africa, who have shown that churches in the mid-twentieth century (both African-initiated and those with missionary foundations) could serve as vehicles for enacting political dissent, extending the ambitions of the nation-state, or advancing a reordering of society.Footnote 13 Globally, too, the influence of Christianity in the making of postwar norms is increasingly recognized.Footnote 14
Bringing these bodies of literature into conversation, this article makes the case for locating intellectual histories of Christianity and communications in regions of the decolonizing world. Using church archives in Mwanza, Geneva, and Rome, together with testimonies and Christian publications, I first locate East Africa in the intellectual history of communication theology, before examining its application in a context of Africanization, and finally assessing how East African trainers and trainees, through curricula and news initiatives, brought communication theology and NWICO into dialogue. Communication theology, I argue, was produced in conversation with institutions like the ones described below, as European theologists explicitly looked to realities in East Africa to undergird their published texts. This by no means implies an intellectual landscape of equality, and even as proponents emphasized a break from the missionary past, colonial institutional inheritance ultimately limited the potential for communication theology to become a dominant paradigm for a new information order.
New states, new theologies
If we were to write an intellectual history of communication theology based on published theological statements, it could begin with Inter mirifica, a much-criticized decree of the Second Vatican Council promulgated by Pope Paul VI in December 1963.Footnote 15 Framing the “media of social communication” as the most important of God-given technologies, Inter mirifica provided Catholic pastoral guidelines for a changing communications landscape, but fell short of reconceptualizing communication itself.Footnote 16 It outlined the responsibilities of newsmen to maintain “morality” in reporting, the need for ordinary people to exercise “moderation and self-control,” and the obligation of the church to provide guidance on “proper use,” through “technical, doctrinal and moral training” to laypeople, with little to say on press and information freedom.Footnote 17
Earlier that year, however, a handful of events took place in East Africa that are equally significant for understanding how the tenets and institutions of communication theology emerged. In January, the first cohort of students enrolled in the Publicity Media course at Nyegezi Social Training Centre; in February, Radio Voice of the Gospel began international broadcasting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; in April, the AACC held its inaugural meeting in Kampala, Uganda, securing funding for the Nairobi Communications Training Centre.
A contingent of reformist European Christians was heavily invested in these events, in the context of a broader vision for the transformation of faith and society as processes of political decolonization took shape. In the best-selling Afrika gestern, heute, morgen (Africa Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow), published in 1960 together with a Swahili translation, Swiss Capuchin theologian Walbert Bühlmann presented common fears about the end of the missionary era, urging Christians to take seriously the threat of “materialism” in newly independent Africa.Footnote 18 Bühlmann was more conservative than some of his contemporaries about the continued role of European missions, but the program for Christianity’s survival that emerged was shared by many of this reformist contingent. First, faith should reach further into daily lives, through a less institutional and more “living” church that gave laypeople greater responsibility.Footnote 19 Second, Christianity should be increasingly ecumenical, setting aside denominational divisions for the sake of survival.Footnote 20 Third, the church should adapt to contexts in the decolonizing world, advocating “localization” in personnel, practice, and sometimes theology. Contradictions and controversies abounded: as Udi Greenberg has argued, decolonization was a critical turning point in the rise of ecumenism, but a rhetoric of equality obscured an underlying attempt to maintain (social and church) hierarchies that excluded particular groups.Footnote 21
Against this theological backdrop, as communication theology assumed form, Christian initiatives in East Africa were a frequent reference point. Launching the German-language journal Communicatio Socialis—a mouthpiece of sorts for communication theology—in 1968, German Catholic theologian Franz-Josef Eilers expressed surprise that, despite unprecedented “interest in social communication and media,” there was no publication concerned with “the rich and comprehensive problems [of] theory and research in religious communication.”Footnote 22 Articles dealing with Christian (not only Catholic) initiatives in East Africa (some eventually authored by East Africans) were considered part of this remit.Footnote 23 The emergence of communication theology, then, is not a history of one-way diffusion from Rome or Geneva to church-led institutions in other parts of the world. It was a vision developed in tandem with institutions like the training centers in Nyegezi and Nairobi.
As such, this intellectual history of communication theology begins in 1960, when a reformist group of Dutch White Fathers conceived of the training center in Nyegezi as a response to the global-historical events of decolonization.Footnote 24 Jozef Blomjous, Bishop of Mwanza, and Léo Volker, Superior General at headquarters in Rome and previously among the staff of the Kipalapala Seminary in central Tanganyika, sat on the liberal, ecumenical wing of their order. Among Catholic orders, the White Fathers already had a favorable reputation for training African priests in pursuit of an Africanized clergy.Footnote 25 These men went further in promoting liturgical adaptation to embrace local cultural practices and involve the laity, ideas they circulated in the African Ecclesiastical Review that Blomjous cofounded in Kampala.Footnote 26
Blomjous and Volker proposed adult training centers with reference to the African continent’s “race towards political emancipation, through self-government, and material prosperity,” and the global “inter-dependence of industrialized and underdeveloped nations”—the year they wrote famously saw seventeen African states gain political independence.Footnote 27 Staffed by a majority of lay instructors, three centers on the African continent would provide practical, non-religious training in “social development,” accompanied by spiritual training in “social ethics” along Catholic lines—precisely the model that Inter mirifica would formalize three years later.Footnote 28 Students would have some secondary-school education, but not enough for entry to university, and would include single men, married couples, and eventually single women, of any faith.Footnote 29
Nyegezi, ten kilometers from the urban port of Mwanza on Lake Victoria, was an obvious choice for one such center. The White Fathers’ presence in the area dated to the 1870s and they administered several schools; unlike in most other regions of Tanganyika, the influence of Islam and the Protestant churches was negligible.Footnote 30 Nyegezi’s surroundings offered opportunities for rural fieldwork (considered crucial), while its lake connections to Kenya and Uganda, and via air to Zambia and Malawi, made it a fitting setting for what was described as a “Community Development Training Centre for East and Central Africa.”Footnote 31 The view from Rome in 1960 was that the UN Trust Territory of Tanganyika, where elections and formal independence were timetabled, was “politically—because interracially—the happiest” country in the region.Footnote 32 By mid-1964, all five countries mentioned (Tanganyika now federated with Zanzibar to form Tanzania) were independent states. Funding flowed from the West German Bischöfliche Hilfswerk Misereor (Catholic Bishops’ Organization for Development), and a Canadian White Father, Jean Lavoie, was director.Footnote 33 Remaining student fees were paid by sponsoring churches, government departments, or employers, who also formed the means of student recruitment.
“Communication Arts” was part of the first course at Nyegezi, and soon gathered momentum when two journalists (again Dutch), Piet Winnubst and Krees Verhaak, approached Lavoie offering to run a dedicated course.Footnote 34 Verhaak, whose family ran a printing business, founded the charity African Publicity following a request to acquire a new printing press at Kipalapala, from where the White Fathers published one of Tanganyika’s largest weekly newspapers, and then turned his attention to training.Footnote 35 This emphasis on training was shared not only by other communication theology proponents but also international organizations like UNESCO and the Vienna-based International Press Institute, who planned their own short courses in the region.Footnote 36 At independence, there were very few East Africans formally trained in journalism or broadcasting: the media was dominated by government, settler, and missionary initiatives in which African employees were restricted to junior roles, stifling independent African journalism through repressive permit procedures and prohibitive costs.Footnote 37 Director Lavoie welcomed the new course, and students arriving in January 1963 could take an eighteen-month diploma in either Social Development or Publicity Media, with shared courses in social sciences and social ethics.
Winnubst later wrote about the course in Communicatio Socialis, but he had already set out his approach to journalism in the center’s newsletter, in an article titled “Africans Should Write More.”Footnote 38 With echoes of a UNESCO refashioning of colonial race psychology, Winnubst deplored the “psychological climate” brought about by an obsession with economic development, which stifled “African intellectualism” by causing “development-sickness” among educated Africans who found themselves alienated by the innately “palaver” culture of the continent.Footnote 39 His teaching emphasized creative reading and writing, stocking the library with African fiction (increasingly available in the mid-1960s). Winnubst initiated the publication of a student “laboratory” newspaper, Nyegezi Weekly News, under a rotating student editorship, to which students contributed opinion pieces, political cartoons, poems, and sports news.Footnote 40 This was supported by a self-described “news agency” in which students collected stories from Mwanza and surrounding villages and aired them to peers in the dining hall, and later to nearby residents through a rudimentary radio station.Footnote 41
Parallel developments were afoot in the Protestant churches. As students settled in at Nyegezi in early 1963, on the opposite shore of Lake Victoria in Kampala, “the end of the missionary era” was declared.Footnote 42 This break with the past was issued by South African educator D. G. S. M’Timkulu, presiding over the inaugural meeting of the AACC in April 1963.Footnote 43 Five years in the making, the AACC represented a desire among African Christian leaders to ensure that the churches kept in step with, and were active participants in, social and political change on the continent. It aligned itself firmly with new African states and “national aspirations.” Resolutions acknowledged that churches had historically “fall[en] in step with the colonial power,” and reined in the role of European missionaries in education and the press: foreign missionary work would henceforth be channeled through national Christian councils, coordinated by the AACC.Footnote 44
Crucially, the meeting demanded theological interventions to accompany this alignment of the church, lamenting those who “deal[t] in foreign, prefabricated theology” whose “unsuitability is due principally to the fact that [it] did not grow out of the life of a living church in Africa,” and calling for the elaboration of an “African manifestation of the life of Christ.”Footnote 45 There were clear parallels here with liberation theology, which, since the 1960s, had sought to revolutionize the relationship between religion and politics through a new theological method, the thrust initially coming from Latin American Catholics, and later shifting to South Africa.Footnote 46 Liberationists worked towards a theology that accounted for earthly suffering and could address the era’s demands for global social justice, themes that punctuated discussions in Kampala, and would shape communication theology too. The motif of a “living” church pervaded the conference report, as did the commitment to “the struggle for [the people’s] emancipation,” including when this demanded violence.Footnote 47
Ecumenism was a prominent conference theme. One observer hailed the “beginning of the ecumenical movement in Africa,” although, in reality, Mindolo, Zambia, where the AACC took up temporary headquarters, had been a hub for pan-African ecumenism since the 1920s, when migrant laborers arriving in the Copperbelt from the wider region organized interdenominational worship.Footnote 48 At the Kampala conference, slogans and discussion groups celebrated unity among the Christian churches as a form of pan-African liberation, treating denominational differences as a “vestige of colonialism.”Footnote 49 Delegates (the vast majority black) represented mainly Protestant and African independent churches, but the Vatican sent three observers in light of the move towards ecumenism under the Second Vatican Council.Footnote 50 Protestant ecumenicals followed the meeting keenly, especially at the World Council of Churches (WCC), which had played a consultancy role in the formation of the AACC. The conference aligned with the WCC’s shift towards “contextual theology” that emphasized social injustice.Footnote 51 Like the WCC (or sometimes in conflict with it), the AACC took explicit political positions, with theological underpinnings, on issues of the day, from refugee rights to apartheid South Africa.Footnote 52
Like at Nyegezi, questions of communication quickly rose to prominence in the AACC. Even the title of the published conference report, Drumbeats from Kampala, made reference to a motif of communication.Footnote 53 For several foreign attendees, Kampala was one stop on an East African conference circuit, following the founding meeting of the World Association for Christian Broadcasting in Limuru, Kenya, and preceding a meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for board members of the newly launched Protestant broadcasting service, Radio Voice of the Gospel. The latter proved a critical venue for communication theology practices to emerge, notably community participation, without which, the Danish Lutheran director explained, “no Christian communication is real and effective.”Footnote 54 This participation was solicited through a 30:70 principle, with 30 percent of airtime devoted to explicitly worship-related content and the remainder to “secular” subjects, apparently with some success, given that Radio Voice of the Gospel was the fourth-most-listened-to station in Tanzania by 1973.Footnote 55 The station opted to “make programmes in places where listeners are,” investing in production offices that recruited local residents with “Christian commitment.” The Moshi office in Tanzania, for example, produced Swahili-language material and was the only office boasting full Catholic involvement.Footnote 56 The embrace of non-religious content mirrored the White Fathers’ approach at Nyegezi, and there was an element of competition: Vatican Radio already had a Swahili service run by a White Father, Piet van Pelt—again Dutch—at Kipalapala.Footnote 57
It was at the Kampala meeting that plans for the Nairobi Communications Training Centre were formalized, partly with recruitment to Radio Voice of the Gospel in mind. The AACC signed an agreement for a grant of 240,000 US dollars from the Evangelische Zentralstelle in Bonn, West Germany, to build the proposed center.Footnote 58 The first director, US missionary Harry Tracy Maclin, moved to Nairobi with his wife Alice, who worked for a journalism training program organized by the International Press Institute. With construction for the Nairobi center underway, Maclin ran short courses in Uganda and at the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation in Zambia, whose African Literature Centre offered journalism diplomas and hosted the 1961 All African Conference on Christian Literature and Communication.Footnote 59
The Communications Training Centre soon found a major sponsor in the shape of a new ecumenical organization—and a pivotal institution for the elaboration of communication theology. In 1968, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) was formed from several smaller organizations in recognition of growing momentum around the topic. Headquartered in London, it worked closely with the WCC in Geneva, and later with equivalent Catholic organizations.Footnote 60 The Nairobi center quickly became one of the WACC’s flagship projects, with a dedicated budget, although the AACC remained responsible for decision making and day-to-day management. In 1976, regular courses of three to six months eventually began in Nairobi, with topics adapted to each cohort of students.
Training presented an opportunity for the WACC to formulate positions on ecumenism, context-specific theology, and relations with secular institutions.Footnote 61 For instructors in Nairobi, presiding over students from across the world, the majority from African states, ecumenism worked in tandem with internationalism.Footnote 62 “It’s faith that brings them together,” explained dean of instruction, H. Kenn Carmichael, referring to “an Arab lady-broadcaster from the Presbyterian Church in Sudan [who] studied along with an Israeli padre from the Open Brethren.”Footnote 63 In training media professionals, the center also satisfied the WACC’s desire to breach divisions between the religious and secular media: students were not imagined as future preachers but rather as “creative professional media people with knowledge of the Christian message.”Footnote 64 The WACC boasted a membership of secular media organizations and professional communicators, as well as church organizations. Its monthly newsletter, Action (deliberately less scholarly than Communicatio Socialis), reported on the communication events of the day—satellite launches and experiments in television for “national development”—and quoted well-known representatives of the Western liberal vision of a global communications revolution centered on so-called developing countries, such as US mass communication scholar Wilbur Schramm.Footnote 65
As the 1960s came to a close, then, communication theology was beginning to take shape. If theology is always advanced from a defined position and perspective (Augustinian theology from the position of Platonism with a Roman/biblical perspective, for example, or liberation theology from the position of the oppressed, with a perspective derived from human dignity), then communication theology was to unfold from a position within contemporary communications culture with a perspective that sought to understand divine presence in that culture.Footnote 66 In theory, then, it was not simply about instrumentalizing (new) media in the service of evangelization, nor maintaining the prominent status of the missionary press in decolonizing countries. Instead, in line with reformist theological shifts described above, it meant a reconceptualization of the media, based on the principle of living Christ-like among people, placing emphasis on the church as a community as much as an institution.Footnote 67 This called for an explicit recognition that “by her very nature the Church is communication” and always had been, in that revelation, faith, and grace could be understood as communication events.Footnote 68 Proponents eschewed an academic approach to communication in favor of a pursuit of relevance and adaptability, but the perceived threat of new media to the Christian message often lay just below the surface in published statements.Footnote 69
Crucially, communication theology demanded recognition of the specificity of the era, perceived by some, like Nigerian theologian and WACC representative Emanuel Fashade, as one of simultaneous revolution and “breakdown” in communication caused by “spiritual undernourishment.”Footnote 70 As Fashade wrote in Action:
Jet travel and satellite communication and many other things tend to bring men closer together. Yet in reality we are daily making this physical contact and intimacy increasingly difficult … How in this situation can there be real communication, interaction of minds, mutual understanding and love which alone can make for cooperation and social progress? … The miracle of radio broadcasting will never bridge our man-made gulfs when our hearts are not turned to Christ.Footnote 71
In this way, communication theology tempered the technological utopianism prominent in UNESCO publications of the same period, but did not reject it entirely: Christian faith became the prerequisite for realizing the benefits of technology and counteracting their potential for evil—for achieving “real” communication.
Publications like Communicatio Socialis and WACC Action, one containing scholarly articles, the other digestible news about projects on the ground, are a telling example of the interaction between theory and practice in the production of communication theology. East Africa-based initiatives occupied a prominent position in both publications precisely because situated practices were to be the substance of this theological intervention. The fact that white, foreign actors held prominent positions in these initiatives (a situation soon to change) not only reflected the limits of any localization drive; it also served as a vector for realities on the ground to circulate through European theological networks. Rarely visible in published essays, however, were the political–ideological challenges, both mundane and existential, that shaped the possibility of communication theology becoming a dominant paradigm for communications renewal in the decolonizing world.
Defining Africanization between church and state
The Communications Training Centre in Nairobi was an obvious choice for the location of the WACC annual meeting in 1971. By the early 1970s, East Africa occupied disproportionate space in the organization’s work—all six staff trips in early 1973 were to this region.Footnote 72 In East Africa, the WACC saw fulfilment of its aim to do away with the “erroneous but common dichotomy” between the secular and the religious, and to see that “Christian journalism becomes truly ecumenical, international, multimedia, technological and professional.”Footnote 73 As one attendee enthusiastically reported,
In East Africa there is no need to promote the idea of comprehensive communication. Staff, people, and committees keep all media in mind, there is remarkable cooperation between denominations in all technical matters. Integration of church related radio … within government facilities is an accepted fact … church and state combine in the social training center at Mwasa [Mwanza].Footnote 74
In some respects, this optimism was warranted, given that the early 1970s saw several regional initiatives seeking to establish an African theological position on communication. In 1972, discussions in Nairobi among Catholic and Protestant media professionals from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia were published as 20 Africans Write on Communication in Action.Footnote 75 Citing Inter mirifica, and published in the wake of its expansive 1971 follow-up, Communio et progressio, contributions insisted on the need for an “African style of communication,” documenting lay initiatives to refashion biblical parables into plays or accompany slides with commentary in local languages.Footnote 76 Like their European counterparts, these thinkers called for “direct apostolic involvement in the secular media,” noting that while it had become fashionable to talk about “communication,” the church had always been a communicator.Footnote 77 It should now, stated the Archbishop of Lusaka, assume the role of “watchdog” over the secular press, “to see that gross misrepresentations do not go unchallenged.”Footnote 78 The watchdog idea reappeared with a different formulation in a published series of consultations on communications at the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation, where the AACC general secretary identified the press and the pulpit as “two watchdogs over society.”Footnote 79 Communications appeared to be both an arena in need of moral authority, and one where the church could play that role.
Yet at the White Fathers Nyegezi Social Training Centre near Mwanza (which the WACC enthusiast referred to), applying communication theology proved complex. That year, Peter Mtabi, the first African director of the institution, concluded that “the future looks gloomy.”Footnote 80 In the foreground of this outlook was precisely the challenge of Africanizing an institution at the intersection of church and state. “Africanization” was a term omnipresent in the discourse of the period across East Africa, and an ideal widely agreed upon, even when its content and implications remained opaque and disputed. But already in 1965, Richard Walsh questioned whether the center was “meeting the needs of Africa today.”Footnote 81 Walsh, a visiting White Father, had taught Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere at secondary school in Tabora, encouraged Nyerere’s political career, and remained a lifelong friend.Footnote 82 At Nyegezi, Walsh spoke to James Shigela, a former student and (at that time) the only Tanzanian member of the teaching staff, who reported that the center was “out of touch” with political and social realities in East Africa, because of the educational background of the almost entirely white teaching staff. An eventual handover to a Tanzanian authority had always been envisaged, and, following Walsh’s report, a series of meetings between Nyegezi staff, the Tanzanian government, and the Tanzanian Episcopal Conference (TEC) representing Tanzanian bishops took place, with the intention of establishing which Tanzanian authority would take responsibility for the center.Footnote 83
The Tanzanian one-party state had to some extent been relying on a lack of clarity regarding its relationship to religion. Like in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, and Zambia, and given the dynamics around the AACC mentioned above, its constitution broadly upheld principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Nyerere (a Catholic) had, since independence, attempted to keep at bay tensions between Christian and Muslim interests, in and beyond his governing party. Religious leaders who did not directly criticize government were allowed to maintain their sphere of influence, and Nyerere insisted that politics and religion could operate independently.Footnote 84 Tanzanian Catholic clergy, like their counterparts in other African countries, joined a progressive front on questions of Christian ecumenism and Christian–Muslim cooperation.Footnote 85
However, this balance became precarious with the 1967 Arusha Declaration, the government’s blueprint for socialism, or more accurately for familyhood and self-reliance (Ujamaa na Kujitegemea). The reaction to Arusha in the Catholic Church was cautious.Footnote 86 Many clergy welcomed its emphasis on brotherhood, sharing, and service, which they considered fundamentally Christian values. Tanzanian bishops drew a sharp distinction between Ujamaa and Marxism, considering the latter “materialistic, anti-religious, and dictatorial,” so Ujamaa did not bring them into conflict with Vatican anticommunism as would happen to some proponents of liberation theology.Footnote 87 The Arusha Declaration posed no direct challenge, as long as “self-reliance” did not mean refusing external financial support. This position faltered when policies began to erode the everyday authority of the church. The Education Act of 1969 nationalized all “government-assisted” schools—essentially the missionary-run schools that were the backbone of the colonial education system.Footnote 88 Although the Act protected the right to religious education, it was interpreted as a subordination of religious education to political education (which became compulsory) and a threat to the “moral consciousness” of the nation.Footnote 89
In 1969—in the aftermath of “global 1968”—students at Nyegezi, welcoming Arusha’s more radical implications, went on strike.Footnote 90 Tanzanian students called for the “nationalization” of the institution and the removal of Jean Lavoie and another (white US) White Father, Bill Moroney, as director and bursar. Students sent a list of demands to Bishop Renatus Butibubage (who had replaced Blomjous, in line with Africanization) and attempted to present it to Tanzanian vice president Rashidi Kawawa, who was in Mwanza on government business.Footnote 91 The document cast doubt on Lavoie’s commitment to Ujamaa, citing his views on the controversial National Service Act. Students also decried the lack of a “specific syllabus and scheme” at the center, and claimed that Lavoie distrusted African men in their sexual conduct towards white women.
Lavoie resigned, recommending as his successor Peter Mtabi, a priest from northern Tanzania who had trained at a White Fathers seminary and held degrees from Catholic universities in Belgium and the Congo.Footnote 92 Mtabi soberly interpreted student grievances as “a dislike … for some subjects; presence of too many wazungu [white foreigners] and, from a few, possible dislike of the Centre still being run by Church men.”Footnote 93 Some students referred to the course in social ethics, introduced by the White Fathers as a spiritual accompaniment to the practical subjects, as “dini [religion] in disguise.”Footnote 94
Students appeared to conflate secularization and Africanization under their demand for “nationalization,” but this was a false premise according to the theological impulse of the moment. Mtabi and Moroney, for example, wanted the government to assume responsibility for the institution, rather than the TEC. Mtabi held that, since “Ujamaa socialism is basically Christian,” the sort of political education that happened in state institutions would align with the original vision of the White Fathers.Footnote 95 This was not a fringe position: as the 1970s progressed, many Catholic clergy encouraged their congregations to “play their part” in Ujamaa, while thinkers influenced by liberation theology framed the revolutionary struggle as God’s will.Footnote 96 This was also pragmatic in the one-party state: “If we do not train students for the Ministries, for whom shall we train them?” Mtabi reasonably asked. Of the fifteen journalism graduates of 1975 (including one woman), all but one or two went to work at government ministries or parastatals.Footnote 97
The TEC, however, remained “suspicious” of a state takeover, despite Mtabi’s insistence that managing the institution promised “practically no … direct benefit to the church.”Footnote 98 Nyerere, meanwhile, had little interest in forcing the matter, either politically or financially.Footnote 99 It appeared inevitable that the center would be transferred to the TEC, although it was not until 1976 that the White Fathers relinquished responsibility for certain aspects, including the relationship with funders.
The TEC’s (Tanzanian) leadership did not herald the Africanization of teaching staff, however. Hired in the name of Africanization, Mtabi found that the policy “seem[ed] to escape all sorts of plan.” Recruiting staff and students was a growing challenge, as the government began planning similar programmes—the Tanzania School of Journalism opened in Dar es Salaam in 1976. The TEC prioritized religious credentials above all else, so when Mtabi appealed to them for recruitment support he claimed he had been forced to hire “anti-Church” staff. But he also warned that the center risked becoming “more and more foreign—expatriates—hence an island, while the political current goes contrariwise.”Footnote 100 Non-citizens were employed (under Tanzanian law) on limited-term contracts, making long-term planning impossible. Racist incidents compounded resentment: Mtabi dismissed a white librarian for telling a Tanzanian colleague that “he did not like to see a monkey behind his back.”Footnote 101 Amid these setbacks, Mtabi requested laicization in order to marry, losing him the confidence of the TEC, despite the important role carved out for laypeople at Nyegezi and in communication theology.Footnote 102
Applying communication theology, through Africanization at the intersection of church and state, was no less complex at the AACC Communications Training Centre in Nairobi. From the outset, the center operated in close cooperation with the Kenyan state, along the terms of mutual support established by the AACC. As in Tanzania, a state-run institution with a similar remit soon opened, but public statements insisted that this was an opportunity for cooperation in recruitment and training, and graduates worked for both state and church bodies.Footnote 103 By the time of the 1971 meeting in Nairobi, the WACC celebrated that the training center was “under African leadership.” In parallel to events at Nyegezi, Maclin had been replaced as director by Yinka Olumide, a Nigerian Anglican clergyman who had worked in the Nigerian state broadcaster’s religious section and as a WACC representative.Footnote 104 Meanwhile, AACC headquarters had moved to Nairobi, and Olumide’s arrival coincided with that of a new AACC general secretary, Liberian clergyman and liberation theology enthusiast Burgess Carr.Footnote 105
However, financial disagreements between the Nairobi-based AACC (who managed the center) and the London-based WACC (who largely funded it) exposed an underlying paternalism.Footnote 106 WACC funding was conditional upon an AACC contribution. In 1972, for example, AACC promised 10,000 US dollars to the WACC’s 33,700 US dollars.Footnote 107 When the AACC funds did not materialize, the WACC blamed Olumide and Carr, emphasizing that the center was the only WACC project to receive its budget in advance, which should not be taken for granted.Footnote 108 The Catholic support secured for the center at the 1971 meeting could not counter growing financial pressure by the mid-1970s, especially as the effects of the first oil shock were felt in Western Europe and East Africa.Footnote 109 Within the AACC, Carr faced a backlash from staff in Nairobi (including at the training center) over preferential employment terms for non-Kenyans, who were provided with accommodation and a salary supplement. Some accused Carr of “clan” politics that favored West Africans (like himself and Olumide) over Kenyans—and of sexual misconduct, which he dismissed as a smear campaign.Footnote 110 The panacea of “Africanization,” prescribed by communication theology, did not account for these regional complexities. Carr resigned, and Olumide was replaced as director of the training center by Zimbabwean Lucas M. Chideya-Chihota.Footnote 111
The internationalist, pan-African underpinnings of both training centers was meant to foster the ecumenism and localization integral to communication theology. But, by the mid-1970s, this was increasingly at odds with the entrenched nationalism of host states. At Nyegezi, with regional integration in decline in the 1970s, Tanzanian students accused their Ugandan classmates of spying for the state.Footnote 112 In 1977, the studio of Radio Voice of the Gospel in Addis Ababa was seized by Ethiopian state security services, and the station nationalized.Footnote 113 Africanization was less an ideological blueprint to be implemented, and more a site of debate where the ideas at the heart of communication theology, about ecumenism and secularization, came into contact with politics on the ground.
Orders earthly and divine
In their 1987 account of Tanzania’s drive for a new information order, Tanzanian news agency director Nkwabi Ng’wanakilala and Finnish NWICO proponent Kaarle Nordenstreng emphasized the primacy of training. They devoted several pages to the state-run Tanzania School of Journalism, assumed to be the natural site for the emergence of a radical intellectual agenda (although they criticized its urban bias and dependence on Western textbooks, notably those produced by the Christian WACC). They dismissed the Nyegezi journalism department, meanwhile, as “just a private programme for the training of Journalists as a part of the Nyegezi Catholic Social Training Centre.”Footnote 114 The very involvement of the church in the institution was assumed to preclude the possibility that a vision for the future of Tanzanian and African journalism could emerge there.
In reality, however, as the 1970s progressed, African staff (now a growing majority) and students at church-led training institutions were increasingly well placed to establish intellectual frameworks for thinking about the decolonization of information, drawing on communication theology and NWICO. Central to these frameworks, as explained below, was a growing emphasis on communication for marginalized rural communities.
Before the principles of NWICO were formally established in the mid-1970s, several were discussed with students at Nyegezi. Under the syllabus topic “The flow of news and information—or lack of it,” students addressed the “Heavy dependence of Africa’s media on foreign sources for news and feature material; How the international news agencies operate; Functions of national news agencies existing in Kenya and other African countries; The need for pan-African news agencies.”Footnote 115 News agencies were a burning topic in emerging NWICO circles, who hoped to lessen the dominance of agencies like Reuters and Agence France-Presse by encouraging new national agencies in the nonaligned world and cooperation between them.Footnote 116 White Fathers had attended a 1963 UNESCO meeting on African news agencies in Tunis, and Nyegezi’s lecturers were well placed to teach the topic.Footnote 117 Malawian journalism lecturer Cyril J. Siliya took his post at Nyegezi after working for the Tanzanian Ministry of Information.Footnote 118 He had received training in Prague and East Berlin, through the Czechoslovak news agency (which provided Tanzania with news wires) and the communist-backed International Organization of Journalists (which broadly aligned itself with NWICO demands).Footnote 119 Like most African members of the teaching staff, Siliya was a Nyegezi alumnus, although he had been educated in Anglican missionary schools.
When Siliya was promoted to dean of the journalism department (the first African to hold the post), he presented a vision for journalism training that combined elements of communication theology and NWICO, claiming to feel “duty-bound” to undertake work “serving a church organisation or fellow Africans.”Footnote 120 His curriculum reforms prioritized relevance: “Traditional journalism is now a thing of the past and planners everywhere now talk of communication. We too would like to associate ourselves with the fellow academicians the world over by introducing some of the current subjects being taught and experimented on in other institutions of communication, [namely] practical subjects aimed at reaching rural communities.”Footnote 121 Keeping in step with disciplinary change was a key driver of communication theology.Footnote 122 Siliya’s plea for “current” subjects went hand in hand with an emphasis on rural settings because of growing global investment in audiovisual technologies in the framework of international development, notions that would gradually be formalized through fields like communication for development.
The implications of this emphasis on the rural for the agenda of media self-reliance came into view when Siliya authored a five-year plan for the journalism department, together with journalism lecturer Hugh Chikawe, a Tanzanian Catholic priest recruited by the TEC, who had earned a journalism qualification from the Thompson Foundation in Cardiff. The plan did not suggest major reform to the theoretical basis of the syllabus: students would still take classes in state-sanctioned political education and church-sanctioned social ethics. Instead, Siliya and Chikawe proposed to bring the syllabus in line with those of secular institutions in African urban centers like Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and Lusaka, through a new emphasis on audiovisual media. Striking a balance between the desire to employ East African lecturers and the recognition that self-reliance in audiovisual expertise was a distant ambition, the plan recommended that East African staff would attend (like the authors had) courses at secular institutions in Eastern and Western Europe.Footnote 123
Crucially, this call for integration in secular circuits of training and technology was framed theologically. In contrast to Mtabi in 1971, Siliya and Chikawe stated that the center could be “one of the most profitable and powerful tools of the Church” by training communicators who would take on secular work with a “Catholic outlook”—precisely the intention of the White Fathers fifteen years previously. To make this point, they opened the report with quotations from two voices in communication theology. First was the aforementioned Swiss Capuchin theologian Walbert Bühlmann, with what may have been a modified extract from Bühlmann’s newly published The Coming of the Third Church: “Either the Church has to speak today through the mass media[,] which is the most effective means of communication in the modern world, or continue to speak from the pulpit, an outmoded and ineffective means of communication.”Footnote 124 Bühlmann singled out East African Catholic community projects as a model of the former. The second quotation came from the International Catholic Association for Radio and Television (UNDA), who took direction from liberation theology in insisting that “the interior and exterior expression of the poor and the oppressed should be given a hearing through mass media.” An information system that served ordinary, rural, economically marginalized East African citizens would also serve the church, Siliya and Chikawe argued, and the means to achieve this was through secular, European training and imported technologies.
The TEC (now in charge of the center) were not pleased to receive the plan (which the authors also sent to two Catholic newspapers). Chikawe was recalled to his diocese without being thanked for his service, in what he considered “improper procedure.”Footnote 125 Students claimed that he was replaced by a white missionary (appointed by the TEC-approved director, Joseph Mutayoba, who had replaced Mtabi) and again went on strike in protest against the slow pace of Africanization.Footnote 126 When Siliya’s contract expired, the TEC refused to renew it, despite the acute shortage of qualified staff. Siliya found a post in Nairobi, at the government-run Kenya Institute of Mass Communication. which cooperated closely with the AACC Communications Training Centre.Footnote 127
But their five-year plan resurfaced. A 1979 version, authored by three journalism lecturers, Tanzanian William Shija (who corresponded with Siliya and later became Tanzanian director of information), Zambian Jerome Danford Kassembe, and white missionary James Poslasky, reframed the proposal as a route towards “an efficient African Communications system.”Footnote 128 They copied the opening quotations from Bühlmann and UNDA, and much of the text, but further developed the point on rural communication. The authors proposed a new course, Mass Communication and Rural Development, which would accompany research activities to produce teaching material “to suit the needs of African countries,” including some in Swahili. The idea that “Africanness” would be located in the countryside was increasingly advocated within communication theology. In 1978, Communicatio Socialis published an article by Nyegezi lecturer Thomas Namwaga and missionary Joseph Healy that attempted to “examine the Communications Environment of Africa through real-life examples [from rural settings] rather than through scientific theories,” unwittingly reproducing timeworn stereotypes about “African” approaches to communication, time, and reason.Footnote 129
Foreign consultants backed the shift to the rural too. At the end of 1979, a delegation of Nyegezi staff and TEC representatives was called to Aachen to meet with the center’s main funder, Misereor, who doubted TEC commitment and expressed “concern … that the journalism course was deteriorating.”Footnote 130 The meeting decided to dispatch as consultant Swiss Catholic priest Michael Traber, a figure emblematic of the growing interaction between NWICO and communication theology. Traber was a leading Catholic voice in the (Protestant-dominated) WACC. Previously a journalism tutor at Mindolo, expelled from colonial Zimbabwe for supporting African independence, he had recently been appointed editor of Action.Footnote 131 His report concluded that Nyegezi should “decide whether Rural Communication will be its major area of specialization.”Footnote 132 The center soon began offering short courses in the subject to Tanzanian civil servants, partly as a means of generating income.Footnote 133
The choice of Traber as consultant was significant. He was central to international efforts to bring together church and secular organizations from Europe and Africa to establish a Christian position on the decolonization of information as NWICO reached its climax in the late 1970s—and continued to do so after NWICO had lost momentum.Footnote 134 Traber was among five hundred information professionals who met in Rome in 1980 to conclude that pursuit of NWICO was in “full harmony” with the Christian conception of man.Footnote 135 At this meeting, Beninese intellectual (and ex-minister for information) Albert Tévoédjrè argued that implementing NWICO was not the task of specialists but rather of “all of us who claim to promote the values of the Gospel through our media.”Footnote 136 Traber insisted on the “pioneering role” that the church could play in the “decolonization of information” by training journalists who would be “truly rooted in the culture of their people.”Footnote 137 Where NWICO emphasized the role of nonaligned state actors in resisting global structures of capital and telecommunications, communication theology called for a broader base.
Students in Nyegezi and Nairobi were increasingly aware of the politics surrounding NWICO in the 1980s, especially following the publication of UNESCO’s MacBride report on media reform.Footnote 138 Nyegezi alumnus Lucas Owen Mnubi remembers both NWICO and MacBride featuring on the syllabus and students being “fully involved.”Footnote 139 Both training centers held workshops on NWICO—in part because the US Information Services sponsored a tour of a University of Arizona journalism professor to discredit it.Footnote 140 Students at Nyegezi were equipped to challenge the US line, however, given that the library stocked books by those seeking to reduce Tanzanian reliance on Western news agencies and promote cooperation with non-aligned countries, such as Nkwabi Ng’wanakilala and Hadji Konde.Footnote 141 Students in Nairobi would have followed the nineteenth session of the UNESCO General Conference in the city in 1976, where the first African director general, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, put information high on the agenda, and perhaps the visit of Sean MacBride (UNESCO-appointed Irish lawyer, author of the MacBride report), who delivered the keynote address in Nairobi at the 1983 conference of UNDA (previously quoted in the five-year plans for Nyegezi).
Meanwhile, Nyegezi students embarked on precisely the sort of small-scale, rural journalism projects that proponents of communication theology considered to be the fundamental manifestation of their vision. Initiated with the first journalism courses in the 1960s, the student paper Nyegezi Weekly News proved an enduring link between students and local residents, and a forum for dialogue between NWICO and communication theology. Its charter framed the newspaper as a service to the community, in accordance with the principles of “ethical journalism” of the sort outlined in Inter mirifica, based on “balanced and responsible” reporting, without a religious agenda.Footnote 142
Nyegezi Weekly News was intended to fill the gap left by state news initiatives in rural areas. The Tanzanian press was effectively nationalized through the 1968 Tanzanian Newspaper Ordinance (Amendment) Bill (featured on the Nyegezi syllabus), which empowered the president to shut down newspapers in the name of public interest. The bill was framed through the idiom of Africanization and self-reliance, and was received positively by some NWICO proponents, while criticized elsewhere as an attack on press freedom. Nyegezi Weekly News was obliged to obtain a government press license, but was largely left alone, whether due to its rural location or to its measured editorial line.Footnote 143 But in the early 1980s, several student editorials reported that collecting stories was becoming “impossible” due to “lack of cooperation between the newsmen and the concerned people, the people with the news,” namely local officials.Footnote 144 Student reporters were being turned away or directed to superiors in Dar es Salaam, a two-day journey away. It was far easier to produce the World News page, where students copied items from the BBC, Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle, obtained via radio or a sporadically functioning Telex machine. Tanzania’s own news agency was barely accessible. At Nyegezi, the flow of information within the nation (rather than internationally) appeared more urgent than it might have to students at the state-run Tanzania School of Journalism in Dar es Salaam. By 1990, Nyegezi Weekly News was describing “the hardships which face freelance journalists in the Third World” in much the same light as Western liberal organizations critical of NWICO, highlighting “risk of detention, deportation or expulsion.”Footnote 145
In short, communication theology’s emphasis on the rural poor chimed better with the experiences of student journalists than did NWICO’s emphasis on geopolitics. In an extended essay for Nyegezi Weekly News as the Internet era dawned, student journalist Godfrey Kiiza described the failures of the communication revolution of the previous decades:
we have seen the extension of written communication from minorities to majorities, we have seen the press expanding from its elitist origins to a democratic style … The amount of information available to those with access to present day technologies has been greatly increased … yet the life of many millions of people especially in developing countries is still one of hard and wasteful toil and of rudimentary substance [subsistence?]—precisely as though these resources did not exist.Footnote 146
The Tanzanian state had, since the 1970s, been emphasizing rural communities as the lifeblood of national development and economic self-reliance, notably through its controversial villagization scheme.Footnote 147 Globally, communication theory was also increasingly looking to rural settings by the end of the 1970s, with fields like “communication for development” emerging under leaders like Nora Quebral of the Philippines Los Baños school.Footnote 148
The role of Christian media as a moral watchdog, promoted by communication theology, was giving way to material realities in Tanzania. When William Shija, one-time lecturer and co-author of the second five-year plan, returned to Mwanza in 1993 as Tanzanian director of information (having earnt a PhD in mass communication from Howard University in the meantime), he heralded a “new trend” in journalism for self-reliance. With Nyegezi students taking notes, Shija “called on journalists to concentrate on motivating people to obtain hand craft skills [to] enable them [to] cease to depend on everything from developed countries.”Footnote 149 From his new position, self-reliance in information was only relevant in the service of economic self-reliance.
Conclusion
In March 1985, a correspondent for Kenyan daily The Nation drew a connection between church initiatives and NWICO debates which has since been almost entirely unremarked. The report, “Viewing the News with African Eyes,” opened, “The need to redress the imbalance in the flow of information between the developed and developing countries was felt by churches in Africa long before many African countries achieved their political independence.” The author went on to describe the opening of the Nyegezi and Nairobi training centers and Radio Voice of the Gospel. The Christian churches appeared as trailblazers in the decolonization of news, launching pan-denominational, pan-African initiatives long before the “debate on the apparent hegemony of the Western wire services [had] become increasingly heated in United Nations forums.”Footnote 150
I do not echo the claim of the Nation correspondent that church actors, such as the European instructors at Nyegezi and Nairobi, were the vanguard of a more equal global information order. Frequently, the ability of these two institutions to challenge the status quo was limited by paternalist and conservative impulses, financial woes, the structural inheritance of colonialism, and the confines of postcolonial nationalism. Nevertheless, in the form of communication theology, East Africa did nurture an alternative vision for a new information order. This body of thought developed through ecumenical institution building and was realized through training programs that were embedded within surrounding communities and the secular media and significantly pre-dated their government-run equivalents.
Histories of twentieth-century Christian thought have shown how the process of political decolonization was transformative, but there is a further step to take by treating institutions in the decolonizing world as starting points. This requires new methodologies: a move away from supposedly foundational texts and thinkers, towards institutional archives that preserve the ideas and conceptual frameworks developed by the trainers, trainees, administrators, and theologians who were the supposed beneficiaries and bearers of Africanization. This methodological move mirrors precisely the public assertions of progressive European Christians who promoted communication theology: that “authentic,” “living” theological insights would emerge from settings where non-European intellectual traditions and the daily hardships of rural marginalization could be witnessed.
By looking to such institutions, it is clear that the role of theology in demands for the decolonization of information merits further examination. While NWICO anchored its agenda to an international system in which states were the agents of change, there were other ways to imagine a transformation of the global information order. The elaboration of communication theology enabled East African thinkers to call into question the state-centric and urban bias of NWICO’s formal program, and to see with nuance the challenges of Africanization between church and (postcolonial) state. The questions that trainers and trainees confronted, as explored in this article, primed the region for its lukewarm reception of NWICO’s agenda. And they touched upon the most urgent political quandaries of the day: whether Africanization should mean replacing personnel or writing relevant teaching material; whether the imported nature of denominations and of national borders demanded that ecumenical institutions should be pan-African before being nationalist; whether rurality could be tapped as the lifeblood of decolonization even if this required imported audiovisual technologies and skills. Communication theology held appeal—sometimes overlapping with that of NWICO—but it did not hold answers to these questions.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to participants of the Isaria Kimambo History seminar, December 2023, Dar es Salaam; the Freie Universität Global History Platform, February 2024; the Polenz African History Workshop, April 2023; and the Bremen Modern History Colloquium, April 2023, for comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to Salvatory Nyanto. Special thanks to members of the St Augustine University of Tanzania History Department, especially Eginald Mihanjo and Osmund Kapinga, for their collaborative work on this research. Peter Mataba kindly allowed me to consult issues of Nyegezi Weekly News. Thank you to Father Celestine Nyanda and Fretar Fabian at Mwanza Archdiocese Archives, John Slinger at the White Fathers regional house, and Marc Nsanzurwimo at the White Fathers archives. Finally, thanks to Lucas Owen Mnubi and Bill Moroney for sharing their memories of Nyegezi.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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