Society and Change in Bali Nyonga: Critical Perspectives

2. Old Wine in New Wineskin? Social Change and Traditional Religion in Bali Nyonga

23 Chapter Two Old Wine in New Wineskin? Social Change and Traditional Religion in Bali Nyonga Babila Fochang Introduction Since the 1950s a wind of change has been blowing across Africa. There is an upsurge in the revival of cultural values, customs and traditions that were once frowned upon by colonial administrators and missionaries (Gibellini 1994:5-6). This seems to highlight or point to the rejection of colonial and missionary attempts to obfuscate Africa’s rich cultural and religious heritage. The version of Christianity that was introduced to Africans was strongly influenced by the spirit of the enlightenment. The enlightenment was tended to privilege reason at the expense of faith and stressed that there was a thick dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical realms. What could not be established scientifically or pragmatically was rejected or considered illusory. On the other hand the African worldview is one that is all embracing. There is a very thin line that separates the spiritual from the physical. African ontology is anthropocentric. This ontology as John Mbiti (1969:16) has rightly demonstrated has five categories. The existence of one presupposes the existence of the others. Any disruption at any level seriously affects the others. God stands at the top as the creator and sustainer of his creation. God3 is followed by the spirits which include supernatural spirits that were born as such and the spirits of dead human beings who have been elevated to that level by virtue of their virtuousness in life. The third on the rung are humans; they are followed by animals and plants and lastly, inanimate 3 We avoid using any gender nouns or pronouns when talking about deities in Africa. Such vocabularies do not exist in many African languages. Take for example Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son is translated into Mungaka as Mu Ñikob – God’s child. 24 objects. These all exist to serve humanity. In this work we shall use this ontology as our interpretive key to understand Bali religion and in the next section we shall look at the interface between Christianity, Islam and Bali religion. In the last section we shall reflect on the future of Bali religion. Our approach to the study of Bali traditional religion is impartial and without any biases for any particular religion. I avoid the word objectivity since it is too misleading in that nobody approaches any investigation like a tabula rasa. Theology is the study of religion from the inside. It assumes that the faith is true, and then it seeks to explore it more fully and often attempts to relate it to faith. Whereas to the researcher of other religions there is the need for a scholarly approach that is neutral, detached and non-committed. It looks at the form of the religion and does not question its validity (cf. Turner 1977), bearing in mind that to the practitioners of any religion, everything done within it is true. Today, most Bali people are Christians and a minority are Muslims. These two main religions harbour fanatics who may not consider traditional religion to be of any worth since their religious disposition or orientation exhorts them to demonize all traditional deities. This is particularly evident among the new Charismatic churches and is vividly portrayed by the unquestionable and insatiable consumption of Nigerian movies that dramatise the demonic and destructive forces of traditional gods and their eventual or inevitable destruction by the Christian God. It may be difficult for a Christian fanatic to assert that there is salvation outside Christianity. However, it is good to know that God is bigger than we may want to define him. When the colonialists, explorers and missionaries arrived in Africa they did not consider that ‘savages could have any notion of deity’(Idowu 1973). As such, they did not want to accept the fact that Africans had a sophisticated understanding of deity perhaps even better than European missionaries. The religions of Africa were considered as juju, animism, totemic worship, fetishism, nature worship or at best ancestor worship. This was the experience in Bali when Zintgraff the first European to Bali felt that “definite ideas of God and an organized cult are absent. There is a belief in spirits 25 which expresses itself in various situations, and angry ghosts. And their appeasement are in the centre of things” (Chilver 1966). Zintgraff’s conclusion was that a good God was not worshipped. Although...