by Paul Theroux
The settler-missionary structure was altered by the Second World War, when the New Hebrides was a base for US troops fighting in the Solomons and elsewhere in the Coral Sea. But afterwards life resumed and the islands reverted to fishing, timber-cutting, and mining (manganese mostly). In the late 1960s and early 1970s decolonization began in a series of conferences, but the sides (British, French, islander) were too self-interested to find common grounds for agreement.
Two leaders emerged in the 1970s – Jimmy Stevens, a charismatic figure with a Moses beard and an Old Testament manner, who called himself Moses; and Father Walter Lini, a Presbyterian – a shrewd, English-speaking, conservative, missionary product. Lini had a broad base of support. Stevens’s followers were mostly on his home island, the large island of Espíritu Santo, with its French planters, opportunists, bush folk, upstarts, and eager secessionists. Stevens also had the support of a meddling right-wing American organization, dedicated to eradicating communism, called the Phoenix Foundation. Stevens’s threats to make Santo independent worried the electorate on the other islands and after several national elections Lini was elected prime minister. At Independence, Stevens led an unsuccessful armed rebellion which became world news as “the Coconut War” for a few days in 1980, until the bearded one was jailed.
After ten years, Lini was still prime minister and Jimmy Stevens was still in jail.
Vanua Bani assured me that Father Walter, as he called him, was very popular and much loved.
He confirmed that the Jon Frum Movement was flourishing on Tanna, and he also said that if I was going there I ought to make a point of seeing Chief Tom Namake, who knew a bit about it.
I packed my boat and left the tourists – Gloria and Bunt (“the blacks here are ever so sweet – not like ours”) and their kids Darrell and Shane, from Adelaide – the cruise passengers, the snorkelers, the Women’s Conference on Nuclear Policy in the Pacific (moved from New Guinea because the women’s safety could not be guaranteed in Port Moresby), and I took a small plane to Tanna.
Chief Tom happened to be elsewhere on the island, and while I waited for him I had the New Zealand born-again Christians to contend with. It so happened that camping was not allowed on this part of the island, and the bamboo hut was the best I could find.
Whenever they were not having a prayer meeting or a preach-o-rama in a village, the born-agains lay in wait for me and ambushed me. It was not hard. The driving rain made it impossible for me to go very far. At first I was more or less supine and let them preach, but I retired to a corner with the Bible and found passages that I asked them to explain. For example, Matthew 10:34–38, in which Jesus says combatively, “I will set son against father, daughter against mother …”
They said I needed faith. I needed to be born again, and they flipped pages until they came to John 3:3 (“Unless a man be born again –”).
I noticed that they were indiscriminate and passionate carnivores. At breakfast they made greasy bacon sandwiches, at lunch they fried sausages, and on some days they spooned tuna fish straight from the tin. My experience among the Seventh-day Adventists of the Trobriands stood me in good stead here.
“The Bible says you shouldn’t eat that meat,” I said.
Their smiles were torpid and condescending, but they went on munching.
Glen said to the others, “Paul’s got spirit. But he needs the holy spirit. He needs Jesus.”
“Leviticus. Chapter eleven. Also Deuteronomy. It’s all forbidden – pork, fish without scales, all of it.”
“There have been directives about that,” Douglas said vaguely.
“He needs the name of Jesus,” Glen said.
I said, “You told me that you believed in the strict word of the Bible. What about all that stuff you told me about the Flood?”
The previous night Douglas had asserted that the Flood had covered the earth. They had found evidence of it in Australia, for example. He believed in Adam and Eve, and in Noah’s Ark. He believed that Mrs Lot had been turned into a pillar of salt. Why didn’t he believe in the prohibitions of Leviticus?
I nagged them for a while, because it was raining and I had nothing better to do. Later that day I read them parts of the Book of Daniel, which had wonderful arguments for vegetarianism: Daniel refused Nebuchadnezzar’s meaty feast, and insisted on eating his usual diet of lentils, which gave him a rosy complexion and helped make him a healthy magician.
“Don’t you think you could learn something from that, Glen?”
“You need Jesus,” Glen said, tucking bacon into his mouth.
“There is nothing in the Bible that says that Jesus ate meat,” I said, and wondered if that were so. They did not dispute it. I liked talking to them on this subject of vegetarianism while their mouths were stuffed with bacon sandwiches.
“Don’t get so intellectual about it,” Brian said.
Brian worried me. He had a loud shouting laugh that was like a warning. He could be rather sulky, too. Brian was the hairiest one, the most bearded, the leader. I was wary of him most of all because whenever he told me how he had found Jesus it was accompanied by stories of how he had been a violent and wicked sinner. I did terrible things, he said, and gave me a hard look, and I took this as a warning that he would do terrible things to me if I didn’t listen to him. I had a feeling terrible things had happened to Mrs Brian, back in Auckland. I defiled the name of Jesus – I wouldn’t even tell you half the things I did. I was horrible.
And he sometimes still looked horrible when we sat at the wobbly table, with his enormous Bible between us. In the margins were his notes, written in ballpoint. Handwriting – just its contours – can look violent. I found his blue scribble alarmingly slow-witted and threatening.
Still the rain came down.
Brian insisted (and the others closed ranks behind him) that nothing on earth was older than four thousand years. Not dinosaurs, trilobites, Chinese tombs.
“Carbon dating has been totally disproved.”
“You’re saying that Tyrannosaurus Rex was running around less than four thousand years ago?”
“It certainly couldn’t have been more than four thousand years ago, because the world hadn’t been created,” Brian said. He pretended to smile in triumph but if you looked at his teeth and his eyes you knew that he wanted to bite you.
Glen then told me about the silicon chips.
“And the Mark of God will appear on the foreheads of those who are saved,” Douglas said.
“But obviously not on mine, is that what you’re saying?”
I did not push these paranoiacs too far. The trouble with such Christians was not their faith in God but their hearty, adversarial belief in the Devil. It seemed to me that it could be a fatal mistake for me to dispute too strenuously with them. There were no doors on this bamboo hut. I heard the men murmuring at night. I did terrible things. They were completely convinced that the Devil himself was at large, roaming to and fro, around White Grass village, perhaps in their very hut, trying to confound them. They might get it into their heads that I was the incarnation of the Anti-Christ and drive a bamboo stake through my heart.
They were “God-swankers” – one of the paradigmatic types that Elias Canetti describes in his strange book Earwitness: “The God-swanker never has to ask himself what is correct, he looks it up in the Book of Books. There he finds everything he needs … Whatever he plans to do, God will endorse it.”
Because of the storms we had each night, the villagers were spared our night-time disputations. In times of high wind and rain everyone in the village ran into a specially constructed hut – rounded and very tightly woven – and there they huddled, one on top of the other, until the storm passed. There was no room in their emergency hut for the shouting, praying New Zealanders.
The Melanesian people of Tanna were small scowling knob-headed blacks with short legs and big dusty feet, and some of them were the nakedest I saw in the whole Pacific, the women in tattered grass skirts, the men and boys in “p
enis purses” (in the words of a Tanna man). These little pubic bunches of grass were about the size and shape of whisk brooms and were worn over their dicks. This bunch of grass, secured by a vine, a belt or a piece of string, was a male’s entire wardrobe. The Bislama word for this item was namba, literally “number.” In Vanuatu one group of people were known as the Big Nambas and another as the Small Nambas.
Most of these grass-skirted and namba-wearing folks were happy heathens living in kastom villages in the muddy interior of the island. Whether or not they were cultists in the Jon Frum Movement was something I hoped to establish, and so I went by Jeep to one of the kastom villages to find out.
It was raining in Yakel village, and it looked as though it had been raining for two thousand years – the huts were soaked, the thatch was soggy, the sky was black, the air was chilly, the ground was a quagmire, and the naked people were huddled – men under one tree, women under another – hugging themselves to keep warm. Rain ran down their backs and dripped from their bums. The women had hoisted their grass skirts around their necks, wearing them for warmth, like cloaks; the men squatted so close to the ground, their nambas drooped into puddles. It was a village of runny noses. In the persistent drizzle it was a gloomy little glimpse of the Neolithic Age, complete with muddy buttocks.
The men smoked bitter-smelling tobacco and passed coconut shells of kava back and forth, and when they smiled at me – which they did often: they were extremely friendly – they showed me black stumps of teeth.
“Yu savvy Jon Frum here?”
They grinned and waved me away. “No Jon Frum.”
It was strictly a kastom village – no Christians, no politics, no Jon Frum – and there were many such villages on the island, though this was the only one which allowed contact with outsiders. The other kastom villages, deeper in the interior, were fierce and xenophobic, and – I had the impression – nakeder, though a namba made you nearly as naked as it was possible to be. In Yakel, a namba was called a kawhirr in their language, which was Nahwal. The language had never been written down and was one of the few languages in the entire world into which the Bible had never been translated.
At the center of the crouching group was the chief, a tiny skinny man with a bushy grizzled beard and clouded eyes and tufts of yellow-white hair over his ears. He was entirely toothless. I took him to be about seventy. I asked him in Pidgin how many Christmases he had had – which was the standard way of asking someone’s age – but he said he had no idea, and added that his Pidgin was none too good.
His name was Chief Johnson Kahuwya. He hadn’t a clue as to where the Johnson came from. He was spokesman and leader. He led the dances. He directed the planting of the gardens. He gave advice. He was the father of the village.
Using a man from a nearby village as my interpreter, I asked the chief how long he had allowed outsiders to come to his village.
“Since 1983. That was when we first saw white people.”
“What did you think of them?”
“We decided not to chase them away,” the chief said.
The Melanesians did not have any organization larger than a village, nor did they have any conception of themselves as branches of a major race, Austin Coates writes in Islands of the South, a book about the attitudes and movements of Pacific populations. When a Melanesian encountered someone not of his group, though he denoted a likeness, he did not think, “It is a man.” The word “man” applied solely to his own group, or tribe. Between his own tribe and others he made an enlarged distinction, much as he would between a pig, a bird or a fish, or between himself and any of these animals. The concept of mankind was absent.
This was also an explanation for the Trobrianders’ belief that they were human and that dim-dims were not. A non-Trobriander was of a different species.
“What about Christian missionaries?” I asked the chief.
“We have no missionaries here.”
“But did Christian missionaries come here?”
“Yes. Long ago. They came.” He was puffing a cigarette – tobacco rolled in a withered leaf. The rain kept dousing it. “They held a service. We watched them. They were talking and singing.”
“Were you impressed – did it seem a wonderful thing to do?”
“No. We watched them. That was all.”
“What did they tell you?”
The chief laughed, remembering, and then he imitated the missionaries talking, “‘After we go, you do this – what we have been doing?’”
“Did you do it?”
“No.”
Now the other men laughed and slapped their wet goose – pimpled arms.
“Why not?”
The chief said, “We are not Christians.”
Nor were they Muslims, nor Hindus, nor Buddhists, nor Jews. They were totally traditional and wished to remain so. I had never met such confident animists in my life – neither in Africa, nor South America, nor Asia. They had no interest whatsoever in changing their way of life. I found the whole set-up heartening, muddy buttocks and all.
“We are kastom people,” the chief went on.
“But the missionaries might come again,” I said, thinking of the four New Zealanders over at White Grass.
“It is okay for them to worship as they want,” the chief said. “But we have different ways. We go our own kastom way.”
“Do you pray sometimes?”
“Yes. We pray for food.”
“How do you do that?”
“We sing for harvests,” the chief said.
All this time the snotty-nosed boys laughed among themselves and the dripping men murmured and passed the kava. And I crouched with them, making notes. I was wetter than they, and more uncomfortable, because I was wearing clothes and I was soaked. Their nakedness made complete sense.
“Where did your ancestors come from long ago?” I asked. “Did they travel from another island?”
“No. They came from this island.”
“Maybe you came from birds and snakes?” I asked, thinking of what the Solomon Islanders had told me of themselves.
“No. We are people. We have always been men.”
In Melanesia, creation stories were always intensely local. The tribal name usually meant “man.” The people of the tribe had either always been there or else had emerged from the land – from live creatures or from trees. Melanesians never said they had arrived from another island, and they never made reference to boats or the sea-journeys when telling creation stories.
The rain with its crackling drops swept through the towering trees and dense bush around us and coursed through the sodden hillside. The grass huts were so wet they looked as though they were in a state of collapse – heavy and toppling.
“You live far from the sea. Do you ever go fishing?”
“Yes. There are kastom villages near the sea. They let us fish.”
“How do you return the favor? Do you give them some of the fish you catch?”
“No. But we give them our trees for wood, and sometimes we make canoes for them.”
“Do you go to other kastom villages in the bush?”
“We do,” the chief said, still sucking on the cigarette. “For weddings and circumcisions.”
A wedding was a straightforward feast, he said, but a circumcision was rather more complicated. He told me about it. It took place when a boy was four or five, and it began first as a great feast – many pigs being killed. There would be a dozen or so boys involved. After the snipping – a sharp knife was used – the boys were sent into the bush for two months. They could not be seen by any woman. They could not touch food with their hands – they used a certain designated leaf, scrunched up, to eat with, scooping the food. They were not allowed to touch their hair, or pick out lice, and if they wanted to scratch their head they had to use a twig. Men were appointed to cook for them. After the two months were up, when the cut had healed, they went back to the village wearing a namba they had made.
I asked the chief,
“What food do you like to eat?”
“Taro. Yam. Leaves. Pigs.”
“If you get money, what do you buy in the trade-store?”
“A knife or an axe. Or rice. Or corned beef.”
“How many wives are you allowed to have?”
“In the past, two or three. Now we have one, usually.”
“Have you ever left this island of Tanna?”
“Yes. During the war. I helped to build the airfield at Vila.”
It was now called Bauer Field, named after the valiant Lt-Col. Harold Bauer, a fighter pilot in the US Marine Corps who, in 1942, battling against great odds, downed eleven Japanese planes and was eventually killed in Guadalcanal. Posthumously, Bauer was awarded the Medal of Honor, and a brass plaque at the airport recorded his courage and his deeds. Bauer Field was presently being enlarged and improved by a Japanese–Vanuatu joint venture, to accommodate Japanese planes and tourists, and I was very curious to know what the Japanese construction company would do with the plaque when the airport was complete. Would they hide it; would they lose it; or would they hang it in the new terminal to enlighten future generations – and the visiting Japanese – about Bauer’s war effort? Time would tell.
“Did you wear a namba when you were building the airport?”
“No. I wore a kaliko.”
“Why not wear a namba?”
“I wanted to. But the American said, ‘Don’t wear this thing.’”
Although the rain had not let up, they took me – the chief leading the way – on a tour of the village, which was nestled against the hillside in tall grass that was shoulder height. Cross-faced men squatted under the drooping eaves. Naked women knelt in smoky huts. The chlildren shrieked at me, their faces smeared with soot. Everyone in the village had filthy muddy legs. They showed me the large round hut they hid in when the weather was very bad: they had spent the previous night in it, all of them piled in, nearly eighty of them.
Later, under a dripping banyan, they did a loud stamping dance, pounding their big flat feet hard into the mud, slowly at first, then quickening their pace, and each time they brought their feet down they yelped and their nambas flopped up and down. The mud dried on their buttocks, giving them brighter smears on their bum cheeks, like perverse war-paint. They skipped in a circle, and shouted hoarsely – egged on by the chief – and clapped, and stamped again, heavily, a thumping that seemed to make the forest tremble and shook droplets from the boughs.