“Yu wanem wan shell kava?” I asked, suddenly feeling very expansive. Evidently, we were all on the same wavelength here, and as evening gave way to darkness and the only lights to be seen came from a kerosene lantern hanging in the kava shed and from those of my own house, I began to hear the kava. These are my people, I thought. True, we may be of different races. And our cultures might be wildly at odds with each other. And my shirt might not be as riddled with holes as theirs. But we are brothers.
“Yu blong wea?” I was asked.
Say what?
“Yu stap wea?”
Seeing my bafflement, he made as if to sleep. “Wea?” Where?
“Ah…mi blong…” I couldn’t find the words, and so I pointed at my house. “Mi blong there.”
This was duly noted.
“Yu gat woman?”
Indeed I did, which reminded me that I had promised to return home while I still possessed my dignity and, ideally, my mobility.
“And?” Sylvia asked, as I stumbled in, immediately dimming the lights.
“I’m as sober as a judge,” I assured her, and then I spent the next hour admiring the faint play of moonlight dancing on a palm frond.
Sylvia didn’t much care for kava. She found the taste repellent, which it inarguably was, and after we had been in Vila long enough, she had come to recognize the kavaheads and the fact that there were an awful lot of them, including a good proportion of Vila’s expatriate men. Kava acts as an appetite suppressant. Ideally, for kava to do its wonders, one shouldn’t eat for three or four hours prior to imbibing. After a kava session, there is no desire for food, except, possibly, for a slice of papaya or a banana. Heavy kava users are invariably rail thin. Indeed, the Frenchwomen in Vila were known to use kava as a diet drug. Now and then, because social life in Vila revolves around the nakamals, Sylvia would join me for a shell at Ronnie’s, and having recently come from America, where a goodly percentage of citizens tend toward the rotund, it was rather remarkable to see such a gathering of skinny Westerners. But that was the extent of her forays. “I feel like the designated driver,” she said. I, however, was discovering that I was immensely fond of kava, and two or three times a week I’d find myself eagerly awaiting the lighting of the red lanterns.
At the neighbor’s nakamal, I’d have languorous discussions with the other patrons about the issues of the day. They were necessarily languorous, of course, because as the evening wore on it became increasingly challenging to attach words to ideas. Nevertheless, I came to greatly enjoy these conversations. I felt my presence at the neighborhood nakamal was what allowed us to live in an unsecured house, lacking gates or bars on the windows, without fear of a break-in. “They even took my bed,” said a friend, a Canadian volunteer, who had been robbed. “It was a king-size bed too.”
“Do you patronize your local nakamals?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I go to Ronnie’s.”
Subsequently, he did visit his local nakamal, where he had kava with the neighborhood chief, who arranged to have his belongings returned to him, bed included.
ONE EVENING the talk in the nakamal turned to Mir, the Russian space station, which was expected to crash on Vanuatu the following day. If it were to hit one of the islands, the government informed us, it would be like Hiroshima, a cataclysmic explosion, destroying all life on the island. Just as bad, the government confidently declared, would be a splash-down in Vanuatu’s waters. All coastal villages were told to evacuate to higher ground. Enormous tsunamis were expected. The government prudently declared a state of emergency and abolished parliament. This had nothing to do, the government announced, with the no-confidence vote it had been expected to lose the next day.
“Yu whiteman,” a fellow patron said, addressing me. “Wanem yu ting?” He wanted to know my thoughts about the impending catastrophe. There are not many subjects I am less qualified to expound upon than the scientific principles affecting a spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere, particularly when compelled to do so in a language that I only dimly understood. Nevertheless, assisted by another shell of kava, which allowed me to see the big picture, I used a stick to draw the Earth, encircled it with another ring, which I called “air,” and tried to explain that when a spacecraft hit the atmosphere at high speed, it burned up, and if anything managed to survive the inferno, it was likely to be small and inconsequential. “Vanuatu olraet. No Hiroshima. No tsunami.”
What about the driver? someone asked.
“No driver.”
So who’s steering?
Well, this stumped me. Who was steering? How exactly does one guide a spaceship down? I felt fairly certain that it involved computers. But how typing a phrase or a code on a keyboard could possibly affect the course of an object hurtling through space was well beyond my understanding. It was the same with telephones. How exactly does one’s voice travel thousands of miles, more or less instantaneously, without even passing through wires or cords? My brain began to throb. These were the wrong kinds of thoughts for kava. Finally, I offered the only answer that made sense to me: “Me ting magic.”
My companions nodded thoughtfully. “Whiteman magic,” one said.
I couldn’t say. But after I had another shell of kava, I knew one thing. “Kava Vanuatu magic.”
TO SUGGEST THAT THE GOVERNMENT OF VANUATU WAS A trifle corrupt would be wrong. It was spectacularly corrupt. Indeed, I believe they even held seminars in corruption: Malfeasance 101, or How to Get Rich on a Government Wage. Whenever a new honorary consul was appointed, one knew something was afoot. The Vanuatu government was indignant, however, when Britain refused to accept its latest honorary consul, Dr. Peter Chen Hun-kee. Apparently, having served eighteen years in prison in Hong Kong for gold robbery was a disqualification for the London post.
It was the appointment, however, of Amarendra Nath Ghosh as the nation’s Consul General, Roving Ambassador, and Trade Representative to the Kingdom of Thailand, Laos, and South Australia that soon had everyone atwitter. In gracious acknowledgment of the honor, Ghosh, who claimed to be a Thai citizen, donated a garbage truck to Vanuatu, and in case anyone was unsure where this shiny new garbage truck came from, he had it emblazoned with a sign that read DONATED BY A. N. GHOSH, CONSUL GENERAL AND ROVING AMBASSADOR. Touched by the gesture, the government waived the ten-year residency requirement and granted him citizenship. Soon, Vanuatu’s latest Roving Ambassador was building a palatial home for himself on the hillside overlooking Erakor Lagoon, and he promised to build a luxurious walled compound for members of the cabinet. For good measure, he threw in a new international airport too, capable of handling 747s. Why not? Those who followed politics in Vanuatu were left wondering—what now?
Since independence, Vanuatu has been ruled by what in Melanesia are called Big Men, high-ranking men from powerful tribal clans. The first was Father Walter Lini, an Anglican minister who presided over Vanuatu for its first ten years as an independent nation. Things got off to a rough start, however, when a radical American libertarian organization called the Phoenix Foundation decided that Espíritu Santo, the largest island in Vanuatu, would make for an excellent libertarian utopia. It was to be called the Republic of Vemarana. The foundation funded and armed a secessionist group led by Jimmy Stephens, which soon declared the island’s independence. As Vanuatu did not yet have an army, Lini was compelled to call in troops from Papua New Guinea to crush the rebellion. Father Lini, however, soon made himself popular by repatriating the land that prior generations of Ni-Vanuatu had sold or were coerced into giving to planters and colonists. Even today, foreigners cannot own land in Vanuatu, though they may lease it. Soon, however, Lini’s government was as riddled with corruption, cronyism, and nepotism as any banana republic’s, setting the stage for his successors. Since then Vanuatu, even by the impressive standards of Melanesia, has been notoriously unstable. Its Big Men plot and maneuver to topple any government not led by themselves. A government rarely lasts longer than a year or two before another Big Man s
ucceeds in buying off a sufficient number of ministers of parliament to enforce a change.
Among Vanuatu’s Big Men, one has long distinguished himself—Barak Sope. He looked, in my opinion, remarkably like Idi Amin with Don King’s haircut, a shocking frizzle of gray that suggested he had some personal experience with forks and power outlets. In parliament, Sope was the distinguished representative from Ifira Island, across the bay from Port Vila. He became prime minister when his uncle, Ati Sokomanu, who happened to be the president of Vanuatu at the time, appointed him to the position. Apparently, this was illegal, and they both went to jail. One would think that attempting a coup would be enough to end a political career, but people in Vanuatu are loyal to their own, and the people of Ifira Island reelected Sope to parliament. Soon he was back in court, trying to explain why exactly he was importing thousands of machine guns, mines, and anti-tank weapons into the country from China. His correspondence on the matter was written on the letterhead of the Central Intelligence Department. Vanuatu doesn’t have a Central Intelligence Department. Sope said that he was merely trying to “defend the sacred honor of the motherland.”
Well, surely, you think, attempting to create a private militia to challenge the country’s security forces would be a career-ender. In Vanuatu, however, this got him a job as minister of finance, and here is where Barak Sope demonstrated his true genius. Say what you will about Sope, but he has gumption. He began a lucrative sideline selling Vanuatu passports, then moved on to issuing official promissory notes worth tens of millions of dollars to an Australian swindler. The financial collapse of the country was prevented only by the intervention of Scotland Yard.
The national ombudsman of Vanuatu, a courageous French-woman who had endured death threats, issued a public report stating that Barak Sope should never again be allowed to participate in the governance of Vanuatu. Barak Sope then became prime minister.
Shortly after we arrived in Port Vila, Prime Minister Sope decided that Vanuatu’s interests could best be advanced by allying itself closely with—of all the countries in the world—Laos. Vanuatu, Sope declared, would invest in Laotian agriculture and mining and help finance the country’s infrastructure. For good measure, Vanuatu would also help Laos launch satellites into space. With what? I wondered. A slingshot? Clearly, the prime minister had had a few shells. I wasn’t sure what the Laotian government thought of this sudden benevolence, though I did think it telling that the only agreement it signed was one pledging “non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” Amarendra Ghosh was to be the first ambassador to Laos.
Barak was up to something, people said in the nakamals. The Trading Post, Port Vila’s liveliest newspaper, began to investigate. The publisher was an Englishman who had lived in Vanuatu for a little more than a decade. His newspaper had a decidedly English orientation, and each day, somewhere in its pages, one could reliably find a picture of a buxom woman in a string bikini—The Brazilian model Eva Jiggles enjoying the sun in Rio. Much of the paper was devoted to the travails of the English soccer player David Beckham and his wife, Super Spicy, or was it Silly Spicy? The real appeal of the paper, however, was in its “Mi herem say” section. This translates as “I heard that…,” and this is where readers had an opportunity to share all the lascivious gossip they had acquired. I am not ashamed to admit that this was the section of the newspaper that got me on the road to learning Bislama. Here were lively tales involving besotted kavaheads and drunken ministers. Did you see the minister of agriculture getting hot and heavy with a bargirl? The Trading Post wanted to know. Imagine American newspapers reporting the salacious details involving, say, the president’s daughter, and how she had been seen, severely inebriated, vomiting in the alley…okay, scratch that, let me think of another example. Imagine stumbling across your neighbor, Mrs. Smith, in flagrante with someone who very clearly was not Mr. Smith. Dying to tell someone? Well, The Trading Post is there for you. It’s that good.
The rest of the paper, however, read like a compendium of press releases issued by the local foreign-aid industry. SAVE THE PIGS BEGINS DRIVE TO END CRUEL TREATMENT OF SWINE, or INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF POVERTY GIVES THREE COMPUTERS TO VILLAGE ON MALEKULA; ELECTRICITY TO FOLLOW. It was with some surprise, then, that all of a sudden, with four-inch headlines, the paper began to publish its investigation into the Sope government. One of its first articles reported the unsavory background of Sope’s choice for honorary consul to Britain. One could imagine Sope thinking, And what do the snoots in England have against gold robbery? The paper then discovered that Amarendra Nath Ghosh might in fact not be a Thai citizen, and that he was being investigated in Singapore for fraud.
This made for compelling reading, and Sylvia and I looked forward to each new installment. The government, however, took a rather dim view of the investigation, and it wasn’t long before the newspaper’s lead story became TRADING POST PUBLISHER DEPORTED. Sometime before dawn, Vanuatu’s security forces had arrived to arrest the publisher at his home.
I didn’t envy him. We had had our own rather unfortunate experience with the security forces. On Christmas Day, as we were walking down toward Erakor Lagoon, where we had planned to go for a swim, Sylvia had been accosted. Christmas, alas, is the one time a year when a good deal of the men in Vila abandon kava in favor of hard liquor, with the result that, for the holiday season, Vila is the scene of considerable mayhem and the town’s pleasant air gives way to one exuding malice. As we passed a group of men drinking, one besotted fool reached for Sylvia. Well, suffice it to say that things soon escalated, and we were on the cusp of coming to blows, when suddenly the bleary-eyed drunk pulled out a machete from his filthy backpack. His companions, all as drunk as he was, joined him. Several were carrying machetes. “Let’s go,” Sylvia urged. This, I thought, was an entirely unsatisfactory ending. I was fairly frothing with adrenaline, and it took a long moment before it dawned on me that if I didn’t walk away, I would be dead momentarily.
Luckily, word of the encounter quickly reached the resort at the bottom of the hill. Passersby had assumed we were tourists from the resort and rushed to inform the staff, who called the security forces. Our little scene must have created quite the impression as a busload of tourists arrived just in time to see three pickup trucks packed with fatigues-clad soldiers pull up in front of the resort. They told us to come with them, and it wasn’t long before they found the machete-wielding drunk. They threw him into the back of a truck and proceeded to beat him senseless, which, frankly, I had no quibble with.
The impression we took away was that Vanuatu’s paramilitary police force were not the sort of people one wanted showing up at your home at five o’clock in the morning. The publisher was taken to the airport, deposited on an early morning flight to Australia, and soon found himself in Brisbane, where, no doubt, he could be heard muttering, “What just happened?” The government declared that The Trading Post had been publishing “state secrets” that were “detrimental to investors’ confidence in Vanuatu.” Most egregiously, the publisher had not respected Vanuatu’s culture, and for this he was deported.
Fortunately for one and all, the deportation was deemed illegal by the country’s chief justice, and the publisher returned to Vanuatu just in time for The Trading Post to announce that Mr. Ghosh had very kindly donated a giant ruby to the good people of Vanuatu. It was, he said, worth $175 million. Prime Minister Sope was delighted, and he announced that, using the ruby as collateral, the government of Vanuatu planned to issue $300 million in bonds. The recipient would be Amarendra Nath Ghosh, who promised—he may have even crossed his heart—to use some of the money to finance a paved road around Efate. Soon Ghosh was also given mineral, fishing, and forest concessions in Vanuatu, and even the right to issue currency in Vanuatu’s name.
Well, this must be some ruby, everyone thought, and we were looking forward to seeing it. Alas, no one was ever allowed to see the enormous gem. It was hidden, for the common good, in a secret location somewhere in P
ort Vila. Fortunately, a picture of the ruby was soon released. It looked remarkably like a rock. Indeed, it was a rock, said a gem expert quoted by the newspaper. Nonsense, said the government. Ghosh had smuggled the gem out of Burma himself. Well, even if it was a gem, wasn’t stealing it from Burma illegal? A trifling detail, replied the Sope administration.
What a curious state of affairs, we thought. I wondered how a nation could endure it. Of course, on the outer islands, where the vast majority of Vanuatu’s population live, there was little inkling that anything was amiss. Still, I was curious as to what those in Port Vila, who did have access to the newspaper, thought about Barak Sope and the giant ruby. In the name of research, I decided to spend a little more time at the nakamals.
“Barak Sope is a great leader. All the world respects him,” said one dapperly dressed man at Ronnie’s nakamal. The others nodded encouragingly.
“But don’t you think he’s being just a tad reckless, giving Ghosh $300 million in exchange for a ruby that no one is allowed to see?”
“But you see,” said my companion, a government official, “Barak knows everything there is to be known about money. Barak is a very smart man.” Pause. “He is my uncle.”
It occurred to me that I was in the wrong nakamal.
At the neighborhood nakamal, however, the mood was decidedly different. The kava drinkers were upset, angry even, that once again the Ifira Mafia—for that is how they viewed Port Vila’s landowners—was robbing the country blind. For a brief moment, I wondered if Vanuatu might finally go the way of the rest of Melanesia: mayhem and anarchy in Papua New Guinea, civil war in the Solomon Islands, a coup in Fiji.
“Yu wanem wan shell kava?” asked my benchmate.
“Tank yu tumas,” I said as we found our moments of poetry, and as I joined the kava drinkers on the bench for a quiet, relaxing, stress-free reverie, it occurred to me that no, nothing will happen in Vanuatu, not while we listened to the kava.
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