Conflict Between New Religious Movements and African Traditional Religion in the Bafut Community The Clash Between Kingship International Ministries and African Traditional Religion Chunyuy Shwei Emmanuel Supervisor Professor Roar G. Fotland MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, AVH5035 : Thesis for Master in Religion Society and Global Issues 60 ECTS I5TH MAY 2019 Word count: 31730 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Writing this thesis and working 50% has been a challenging experience for me, family members, friends and colleagues. Thus, a good number of people who made this possible should be mentioned. To begin with, I wish to say thank you to my parents both in Cameroon and Norway for their: love, support both material and financially. May God continue to bless you abundantly. Secondly I wish to thank all research assistants and interviewees who made it possible for me to have the corpus which I have analyzed in this thesis. Finally I am thankful to my supervisor Prof. Roar Fotland for his support and patience. You are truly a father to me .From the bottom I am greatly thankful. Omissions and mistakes are mine. i ABSTRACT After identifying the conflict between New Religious Movements and African Traditional Religion as a potential area for academic research, this research set out to answer a main research question and sub questions. The main research question was: Why and how do New Religious Movements clash with African Traditional Religion in the Bafut community of the North West of Cameroon? This question was further broken down to four sub questions including; What does the NRM think of ATR theologically?, How has ATR responded?, How are these clashes resolved or diffused?, What impact do these clashes have in the community during and after the conflicts? These questions transliterated to the objectives of the project, objectives which were attained through various research methods and theories. Primary research was done through ethnographic interviews, participant observations and field notes. Secondary data was collected from libraries and the internet through mediums like books, journals, encyclopedias and other electronic materials. These materials reviewed were combined with the concepts of cosmic war and contextual theology to form the interpretational grid for the analysis in the thesis. After a closer scrutiny of the findings, the research concluded that the absence of contextual theology manifested in the presentation of Christianity (by New Religious Movements) as supra-cultural leads to the demonization of native religion (ATR) leading to consequent attacks and counter attacks and thus the conflicts that take the form of cosmic wars. The work concludes that the administration of corresponding forms of contextual theology and the promotion of interreligious dialogue for reconciliation can mitigate the conflicts. ii 1 ABBREVIATIONS NRM (s) = New Religious Movements ATR = African Traditional Religion KIM = Kingship International Ministries African Initiated Churches (AICs iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 1.0 General Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Themes/ key words and Definitions .............................................................................. 1 1.1.1 African Traditional Religion (ATR)...................................................................... 1 1.1.2 New Religious Movements (NRMS) ...................................................................... 2 1.1.3 Religious Conflicts/ Cosmic Wars ......................................................................... 2 1.1.4 Contextual theology. ............................................................................................... 4 1.2 Motivation ....................................................................................................................... 5 1.3 Objectives ........................................................................................................................ 5 1.4 Literature Review/ Research Overview ....................................................................... 6 1.4.1 Literature on New Religious Movements ............................................................. 6 1.4.2 Review for African Traditional Religion ............................................................ 11 1.4.3 Rites and Rituals in ATR ..................................................................................... 12 1.4.4 Sacred Places and Spaces ..................................................................................... 13 1.5 NRMs and conflict with ATR ...................................................................................... 14 1.6 Implications for my project. ........................................................................................ 16 1.7 My contribution ............................................................................................................ 16 1.8 Analytical Unit and the Research Question ............................................................... 17 1.8.1 The area ................................................................................................................. 17 1.8.2 The person ............................................................................................................. 17 1.9 Problem statement........................................................................................................ 17 1.10 Research questions ....................................................................................................... 17 1.11 Limitations/Scope ......................................................................................................... 17 1.12 The research design of the thesis ................................................................................ 18 1.13 Scholarly discipline ...................................................................................................... 18 1.14 The structure ................................................................................................................ 18 CHAPTER TWO: THEORY ............................................................................................. 20 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 20 2.2 Cosmic war.................................................................................................................... 21 2.2.1 Cosmic War and the Legitimization of religious violence ................................. 24 iv 2.3 Contextual Theology .................................................................................................... 27 2.3.1 Models of Contextual Theology ........................................................................... 29 2.3.2 The Anthropological model .................................................................................. 30 2.3.3 The Translation Model ......................................................................................... 32 2.3.4 The Praxis Model .................................................................................................. 33 2.3.5 The synthetic models............................................................................................. 34 2.3.6 The semiotic model ............................................................................................... 34 2.3.7 The transcendental model .................................................................................... 35 2.4 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY ......................................................................... 36 3.1 Participant Observation .............................................................................................. 36 3.2 Interviewing .................................................................................................................. 39 3.3 Field Notes ..................................................................................................................... 39 3.4 Location ......................................................................................................................... 40 3.5 The Process of Data Collection ................................................................................... 40 3.6 Challenges ..................................................................................................................... 42 3.7 Secondary Sources of Data .......................................................................................... 42 3.8 Research ethics considerations (discipline) ................................................................ 43 3.9 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 44 CHAPTER FOUR: SOCIOPOLITICAL BACKGROUND ........................................... 45 4.1 History of Cameroon .................................................................................................... 45 4.1.1 Early History ......................................................................................................... 45 4.1.2 Colonisation ..........................................................................................................