Article
Culture
Time
2 min read

Taking the train taught me about time travel

A delay gives time to think about time.
A airy and light station concourse in which people stand and look at a long set of travel information screen.
Waiting at New Street Station, Birmingham.

I like trains. 

Or rather, I like the idea of trains. I feel a sense of entirely false nostalgia for a railway age that I am far too young to have lived through. 

I have this picture postcard image of a time when trains puffed along through idyllic countryside scenes, trailing fluffy white clouds behind them. Each commuter railway service a kind of Hogwarts Express to a magical world in a time when trains were on-time, sheep grazed contentedly trackside and the journey was the destination. A time which probably never existed.  

The reality doesn’t quite live up to the fantasy. 

My picture postcard is a little different. Sweaty armpits. Stale air. Sardines in a can.  

Wish you were here. 

My journeys are slightly less magical. 

  

Or they are, at least, on the days when I am able to get anywhere at all.  

Today isn’t one of those days.  

My train is cancelled again, because of course it is. 

The other day it was a landslide across the tracks. In the Midlands, the flat Midlands.  

But today it’s something to do with strikes, continuing disruption and overtime working bans. 

The Hogwarts Express is cancelled due to a shortage of train crew.  

  

As much as I enjoy the concourse of Birmingham New Street station, I feel I spend entirely too much time there.  

Rather than admiring the countryside scenes of my imagination, instead I find myself with no choice but to spend an extended moment admiring the glowing amber of the station clock. 

Enthroned between destination boards, reigning supreme over the train travellers, is the clock – ticking digitally away.  

In its court I stand transfixed, not because I am hypnotised, captivated or held hostage, but because I have nowhere else to go.  

Of course, clocks, railways (steam or otherwise) and strike action are not incidental to the situation I find myself in.  

The truth is that the age of steam never lived up to my rose-tinted imaginings. In reality it was the genesis of a clockwork age. An age of factories and precision, where cards were punched, steam whistles sounded, and time was metered out. An age that we haven’t fully escaped. The station clock may be digital, but our lives are still clockwork. 

Ever since, people have continued to dance to uncomfortable mechanical rhythms. The striking workers have simply decided to stop dancing for a while.  

  

There was another Genesis of a different age before all the noise. An age of sea and sky and forests of trees. A garden age with a different tune to dance to: a rhythm of planting, of wind rustling the wheat, of harvest, of rest. A life-shaped rhythm of goodness and grace, where relationship – to one another, to the world – was central, rather than productivity. 

This Eden is at once the point of departure, as well as arrival. Appearing as a gardener, Jesus rises from the tomb with an open invitation to return to a life lived at God’s speed.  

As an alternative to the rush of commuters going nowhere very fast – the way of Jesus is a journey with a true destination. Life in all its fullness.  

Full – not overfilled. 

  

Daydreaming, time passes. My wait ends. 

As I board my train, and my nostrils fill once again with its stale air, I think about the wind through the trees.  

  

Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.