The Real History of the End of the World (32 page)

1
Quoted in Jassim M. Hussain, “Messianism and the Mahdi,”
Expectation of the Millennium: Shi'ism in History,
ed. Seyyed Hoossein Nasr et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 13.

2
Unless otherwise stated, the biographical information is from James Thayer Addison, “The Ahmadiya Movement and Its Western Propaganda,”
The Harvard Theological Review
1, no. 22 (1929): 1-32. It should be noted that there are two Ahmadiya sects that have nothing to do with each other. The first was established in Arabia in the late 1700s and is not particularly millennial.

3
Addison, 6.

4
Jamal J. Elias,
Islam
(London: Routledge, 1999), 63.

5
Shahid Javed Burki, Craig Baxter, Robert Laporte Jr., Kamal Azfa,
Pakistan under the Military
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 170.

6
Arye Oded,
Islam and Politics in Kenya
(Boulder, CO: Reinner, 2000), 18.

7
Theoretical physicist Abdus Salam, winner in 1979.

8
Mohammad S. Umar, “Muslims' Eschatological Discourses on Colonialism in Northern Nigeria,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
67, no. 1 (1999), 61.

9
Ibid., 68.

10
Ibid., 69.

11
Ibid., 71-72.

12
P. M. Holt,
A Modern History of the Sudan, from the Funj Sultanate to the Present Day
(New York: Grove Press, 1961), 76-78.

13
Hassan Abdel Aziz Ahmed, “The Turkish Taxation System and Its Impact on Agriculture in the Sudan,”
Middle Eastern Studies
16, no. 1 (1908): 106.

14
Holt, 88-90.

15
Nicole Grandin, “
A près le Mahdi: La politique coloniale chez les pasteurs arabes soudanais
,”
Cahiers d'Étdes Africaines
18, no. 17/18 (1978): 124.

16
Harold F. Gosnell, “The 1958 Elections in the Sudan,”
Middle East Journal
12, no. 4 (1958): 413.

17
Awad al-Sid al-arsani, “The Establishment of Neo-Mahdism in the Western Sudan, 1920- 1976,”
African Affairs
86, no. 344 (1987): 390.

18
Ibid., 403.

19
Ibid., 404.

Identifying Cargo Cults with madness and the unhealthy
products of the irrational unconscious mind has no doubt
served the prevailing discourses of colonial and Western powers.

—Professor Michele Stephen (1997)
¹

 

 

 

 

T
he so-called Cargo Cults of Melanesia, particularly New Guinea, are not really millennial in the sense that they expect a violent battle or disaster followed by a thousand years of peace, ending with a final judgment. But the basic themes of millennial beliefs are there, and with the arrival of Pentecostal millennial missionaries, these beliefs have become more in line with that of Western movements, with the addition of traditional Melanesian attitudes toward the afterlife.

At one time it was thought that these cults were caused by contact with the outside world and, particularly, Christian missionaries. Now, it's understood that the apocalyptic tendency was already present in many Melanesian cultures. The intrusion of Western trade, religion, and colonialism was just the spark that caused them to explode.

In most of the societies of Indonesia, New Guinea, Java, the Celebes, and other parts of Melanesia, people believe that ancestors are not gone forever or even very far. The dead become spirits who continue to help their families and bring them gifts from the other world. This idea of gifts from the dead caused one of the first misunderstandings between the Christian missionaries and the people of the Yangoru of Papua New Guinea. This happened when the European priests arrived in the Yangoru village in 1912. At first they were greeted with delight and respect. One of the priests, Father Limbrock, wrote, “the word missionary has a good sound here.” What he didn't understand was that the Yangoru thought that these pale people were “kamba, spirits of the dead, who had returned to visit their living relatives.”
²

This was the first of many cases of what anthropologists call “cognitive dissonance,” in which two cultures operate from entirely different basic belief systems that meet at only a few places. Therefore, each group interprets information and events differently, often without realizing that the difference exists.
³

This is one reason that the tribes of Papua New Guinea took so rapidly to Christianity. They embraced the beliefs that made sense to them from the preachers' stories. One of those beliefs was the idea of an apocalyptic event, followed by a new and better order. But for the people of New Guinea, newly colonized and introduced to twentieth-century goods and technology, this “millennial” world meant that the Christians would take the place of the ancestors and share the wealth.

The Apocalypse would for them be a violent overthrow of the colonial powers. The millennium wasn't exactly understood as the thousand years of peace and harmony either. The new Christians assumed that accepting the religion meant they would receive all the things that the colonials had. From this grew what is known, somewhat inaccurately, as “cargo cults.”
⁴

The classic image of the post-World War II cargo cult is that of natives bringing offerings to rusting airplanes in the anticipation that the gods would send more goods. The reality is much more sophisticated. As early as the 1800s, the missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, simplified the message of Christianity to make it understandable to “simple natives.” So they stressed the rewards of heaven if one accepted Jesus' teaching and the pains of hell if one did not. They proved this by giving presents from mission boxes to the converts. It was natural for the natives to assume that this was part of the deal attached to the religion. When more and more people came to church, however, the boxes were too soon emptied. So the latecomers felt cheated.
⁵
The missionaries weren't living up to their side of the bargain.

What the missionaries didn't understand was the relationship of the people with their ancestors, which was not diminished by conversion. The ancestors were not an article of faith but real beings with whom they interacted. Sometimes they appeared in human form or that of birds. They provided good crops and sufficient rain as well as protection from disease and enemies. In return, their descendants honored them, performing rituals of thanks and caring for their bones.

When the missionaries came, they explained that the people should throw away the bones of their ancestors because now God would provide for them.
⁶

In response, many people threw out the bones and other ritual objects and put the responsibility for their welfare on Jesus. They expected him to give them even more than their ancestors had because, according to the missionaries, he was so much greater. In order to clear the way for the coming savior, “the villagers destroyed their gardens, food reserves, and killed their livestock in the hope of thus hastening the day of the coming new cargo.”
⁷

Even though they stopped performing the religious rites to propitiate ancestors, the belief in them remained and many were certain that the Euro-Australians, Americans, and other foreigners were either the spirits themselves or knew how to contact them. This again led to expectations that the wealth would be shared. Even those who didn't believe the white people were spirits wanted to send letters via the missionaries and anthropologists to their dead relatives, hoping that those spirits would return with the proper reciprocal gifts.

In his study of this phenomenon in another group in Papua New Guinea, Stephen Leavitt concluded: “[The] Bumbita interest in Europeans' relations with the dead presupposes that we all live in the same moral universe, not that the Europeans are somehow fundamentally superior.”
⁸
This is one point of view. In other cases, natives were made to feel that they were not as good as the colonizers. If they were, they would have received the same opportunities for wealth.
⁹
This impression strengthened the need for an Apocalypse after which the situation would be reversed or at least equalized.

So throughout the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, the people of Melanesia were both encouraged to accept Christianity and disappointed when the promised rewards and protection failed to appear.

Then, in the late 1970s, more decisively apocalyptic bands of missionaries came to New Guinea. They were Seventh Day Adventists, Baptists, charismatic Catholics, and others. These Pentecostal and charismatic Christians made great inroads into changing religious practice. In places where old and new beliefs had co-existed for decades, the traditional ceremonies were abandoned and the sacred spaces reused for crops.
¹⁰

By the 1990s, the belief that the millennium would arrive in 2000 led many who had been sitting on the fence to decide to be born again. “The inevitability of Jesus' return and the last judgment put pressure on people to be ever prepared for these events by becoming righteous Christians.”
¹¹

Most evangelists did not stress the actual date of the Second Advent, and after Y2K passed without incident, the Pentecostal movement still continued to grow, spread by the converts themselves, some of whom were trained at workshops in New Guinea and others who had gone to Australia for a religious education. Today, this form of Christianity is the major religion of Papua New Guinea.

THE people of Java, on the other hand, began with a very different worldview from those of New Guinea. The central creed in Javanese society was balance. The traditional phrase for this is
tata tenteram,
or “peace and order in harmony.”
¹²
Like the Maya and many others, traditional Javanese concepts of the world are cyclical and astronomical. “[T]he affairs of the men and the event of the sky are both directed by elemental forces that recur over and over again.”
¹³
At some points in history, the balance is too far off to repair in the usual fashion, and then there is a period of apocalyptic change, after which a “new cosmic order will prevail.”
¹⁴

In the early centuries of the Common Era, Java was heavily influenced by Hindu religion. From this, the people adopted the idea of a series of ages that grew increasingly dissolute with each change. The Javanese found this easy to incorporate into their worldview. It is thought that at about this time the concept of the
ratu adil,
or “just king,” became popular. This was a quasi-messianic leader who would appear in desperate times to restore cosmic harmony. This fully Javanese messiah had aspects of the Hindu-Buddhist
Erucakra,
or one who restores order.
¹⁵
When Islamic rule came to Java and Indonesia in the sixteenth century, most Javanese added the Mahdi to the titles for the
ratu adil
. In the early nineteenth century a prince-religious leader, Dipanagara, was called by all three titles. Even after his defeat, there were many who continued to believe that he was the savior whose coming had been foretold.
¹⁶
The Indonesian leader Sukarno was thought by some to be the
ratu adil
, and he didn't object. The prophecy
Babad Kadhiri
stated that the
ratu adil
would give “ justice after a long period of oppression.”
¹⁷

Although Christianity did not attract many converts in Java and Indonesia, the missionaries who had some success did so by explaining that Jesus was the expected
ratu adil
.
¹⁸

So both the people of Papua New Guinea and Java retained their basic outlook on life and the universe while accepting beliefs from outside cultures that fit with this outlook. In both cases, there was already a thread of belief in the destruction of the world and the coming of one who would save the deserving. In Java, the need for order and balance outweighs all others. In New Guinea, the system is based on a reciprocal agreement with the ancestors or, if they are abandoned, with the religion that replaces them.

Especially in the case of New Guinea, the encouragement of Pentecostal Christian missionaries to replace old beliefs and rituals with Christian ones has led to extreme behavior, like the destruction of property to make way for the riches promised by the Second Coming and subsequent millennium.

The international spread of evangelical preachers from both Catholic and Protestant millennial sects has caused a mind-set of approaching doom in societies that had previously established systems for keeping the universe running. The new beliefs either are totally opposed to the old, creating tension in the culture, or are altered to fit into traditional worldviews. Either way, the Apocalypse has taken on a life far removed from the teaching of John in Revelation.