WACC honours Michael Traber

Piet Halma (left), WACC Vice-President, presents Mike Traber (right) with the “tongue of fire” award as Honorary Life Member.

Attended by 25 colleagues and friends, the ceremony took place at the Bethlehem Mission House, Immensee, where Mike is being cared for in his illness. It is also where he was ordained in 1956.

Randy Naylor, WACC General Secretary, giving a meditation during the honorary life membership service for Mike Traber.

WACC General Secretary, Randy Naylor, and Vice-President, Piet Halma, led a service recognising Mike Traber’s extraordinary contribution to the development of Christian communication, especially in East Africa, Southern Africa, and Asia. In recent years he taught at United Theological College, Bangalore, India, where he helped develop a master’s and a doctoral degree course in communication and theological education.

The service included verses from Hebrews 11 and 12 describing faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”, characteristics of Mike Traber’s missionary conviction. In response, Fr Joe Elsener, a life-long colleague of Mike’s at the Bethlehem House, read a statement on behalf of Mike, whose voice is now no more than a whisper.

Mike said, “I consider myself to be a gift of the Catholic Church to the ecumenical movement. By participating in this movement I was in effect – and happily –– under the authority of Protestant Churches. One of my tasks has been to bear witness to the seamless and undivided garment of Christ, or to the ecumenical character of God’s Reign. A second task was not only to bear witness among my Protestant friends but, equally so, among my fellow Catholics. In that sense, I am also a gift of the ecumenical movement to the Catholic Church.”

Speaking of the churches’ public communication as “not primarily a service to the churches but, more comprehensively, an action centred on furthering the Kingdom of God. The church, after all, does not exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the Kingdom. The values of God’s Reign – such as equality, justice, reconciliation, freedom, harmony, peace and love (‘shalom’) – have inspired my work. May these values guide me to the end of my days.”

To mark his honorary life membership of WACC, Mike was presented with a certificate, a collection of written tributes and a glass “tongue of fire”.

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Biographical notes on Michael Traber

Michael Traber (b. 1929) was educated in Switzerland. In 1956 he was ordained into the Bethlehem Mission Society from where he went to the USA to study sociology and mass communication at Fordham University and New York University (1956-60). He gained his PhD in mass communication.

The Bethlehem Fathers’ close ties with Southern Africa led Mike to work in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as director of Mambo Press and editor of the critical weekly newspaper Moto (1962-70). Mambo Press published books in English and Shona as well as producing audiovisuals.

In 1970 Mike founded and managed Imba Verlag, a book publishing house in Fribourg, Switzerland, before returning to Africa as senior lecturer in journalism at the Africa Literature Centre, Kitwe, Zambia (1973-76). During those years he also did media research in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

Mike Traber joined the staff of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in 1976 as director of its fledgling Periodicals Development Programme and editor of its quarterly journal Media Development. One of his early responsibilities was to find a way of using the press in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. When the South African Council of Churches (SACC) established a newspaper in Johannesburg, called The Voice and began to seek financial support, it was agreed that funds would be used to contribute to its running costs and to support Grassroots, a black community newspaper in Cape Town. Mike was instrumental in securing support for such politically ‘strategic’ periodicals.

In 1976 in response to the call of many developing countries for ‘decolonisation of information’, UNESCO undertook a review of the problems of communication in contemporary society against the background of technological progress and recent developments in international relations. It established the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems under the presidency of Seán MacBride. The outcome, published in 1980, was Many Voices, One World: Communication and Society Today and Tomorrow with its slogan ‘Towards a new more just and more efficient world information and communication order’.

Mike gave a lifetime’s unwavering support to the concepts inherent in the NWICO, the values espoused by the MacBride Roundtables and later to the concept of communication rights. Similarly, he put his intellectual weight behind the push for a systematic study of the interconnections between theology and communication, a WACC programme that became operational in the early part of 1983 and which Mike later pursued at United Theological College, Bangalore.

Throughout this period Mike also worked closely with Dr Robert A. White, at that time director of research at the Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture (London) to edit a series of monographs on ‘Communication and Human Values’. The aim of the series was to contribute to the development of social philosophies of communication based on a general conception of human rights and appropriate to particular cultural contexts.

In 1984 at the suggestion of Hans W. Florin, then WACC’s General Secretary, Mike Traber drafted eight propositions about communication for discussion by its Central Committee. He argued that information and communication were drastically changing the world, but instead of establishing commonality and solidarity, public communication was tending to reinforce divisions, widen the gap between rich and poor, consolidate oppression, and distort reality in order to maintain systems of domination and subject the silenced masses to media manipulation.

Thus, in 1986, were WACC’s Christian Principles of Communication born. They affirmed that genuine communication creates community; that it is participatory; and that it liberates, supports and develops cultures, and is prophetic. This landmark in the development of WACC provided the theological and rational basis for its first international Congress (1989) and laid the foundations for the first ‘five-year study and action programme’.

On his retirement from WACC – but not from communications – in 1995, a book on The Democratization of Communication was published in his honour, containing contributions from colleagues working in the global field of mass communications. As it emphasized, Michael Traber stood for: ‘…the universal values of humanism, above all peace, democracy, human rights, social progress and national liberation, while respecting the distinctive character, value and dignity of each culture, as well as the right of each people freely to choose and develop its political, social, economic and cultural systems.’