A New Day for French-speaking Africa | Lausanne World Pulse Archives
“Being an evangelical publisher for the French-speaking world is the worst of two worlds,” quipped Greg Burgess of Editions Clé in France. “In Europe, the population has means, but there are very few Christians; in Africa, there are millions of Christians, but very limited resources.”
Christian publishing in Francophone Africa remains fragile at best. Publishers lack training and resources, and they struggle to survive amidst political instability and poverty. They have generally benefited from far less support than their English-language colleagues on the continent. Why?
“French-speaking Africa was often regarded as the poor man of the evangelical world because of its colonial past characterized by a low vitality of Protestantism in France and Belgium,” wrote Daniel Bourdanné, a native of Chad and general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).
“Missiologically, French-speaking Africa was often neglected. This part of the world is culturally difficult and little known by the evangelical world dominated by American and Anglo-Saxon culture.”
Some twenty African countries have French as an official language. Media Associates International (MAI) hopes to spur the creation of the written word in these nations, as does director Jules Ouoba of the region’s largest publisher, Centre de Publications Evangéliques in Côte d’Ivoire. He has spearheaded regional publishing workshops in Benin, Cameroon, and Mali in recent years with MAI.
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LittWorld 2012: Save the date! MAI’s unique international publishing conference, LittWorld 2012, will take place in Nairobi. “MAI returns to Africa with the goal of building on momentum from the 2009 conference, which ranked among the best so far, and to increase our training support on the continent,” said MAI president John Maust. For more information, click here. |