Vanuatu
A Melanesian nation of three hundred thousand on eighty South Pacific islands, held together by kastom: the bond to ancestral land, rank earned by pig and feast, and wealth measured in the curved tusk. The complete guide, the forces first.
Vanuatu is a Melanesian nation of about three hundred thousand people on some eighty islands in the southwestern Pacific, and the word that holds its culture together is kastom, the whole inherited way of custom, land, ritual, and law. Its life rests on a handful of forces: a deep bond to ancestral land, by which a person is of a place; a way of earning rank and respect, in much of the country, by rising through graded ranks at great feasts; and a wealth measured in pigs, above all the curved-tusk pig, and in fine mats, that moves through every ceremony. Christianity sits over all of this now, woven together with kastom rather than replacing it, in a country famous for keeping the old ways alive.
Kastom
The word that opens indigenous Vanuatu is kastom, the Bislama term for custom, and it means far more than quaint tradition. Kastom is the whole inherited order of a people: their law and their land rights, their ceremonies and their dances, their knowledge, their art, their dealings with the spirits, and the magic that runs through all of it. To live by kastom is to live as a ni-Vanuatu, the indigenous people of these islands, in the way handed down from the ancestors, and the word stands for the Melanesian way of being against the way the Europeans brought. So central is it that the nation built its drive for independence around it, and its constitution names custom a source of the country's law, to stand beside the introduced law of the courts.
Kastom is not one thing across the country, for Vanuatu is the most divided land on earth by language. Among only a few hundred thousand people more than a hundred distinct tongues are still spoken, the densest gathering of languages anywhere, each tied to its own place and its own customs. To carry on across this divide the people share Bislama, an island speech built on English words and Melanesian grammar, which is the national tongue and the one language nearly all hold in common. The very name Vanuatu means, in many of these languages, our land, and the land is where kastom lives.
Beneath the Christianity that now covers the islands runs the older world that kastom remembers, a world thick with spirit. The ancestors are present everywhere, in the ground, the stones, and the places set apart as tabu, sacred and forbidden; a power the old religion called mana moves through people and things and can be gained and lost; named gods and culture-heroes shaped the islands in the beginning. This older world has not vanished under the church but lives alongside it, and to understand anything else in Vanuatu, the chiefs, the pigs, the feasts, the land, is to hold kastom in mind as the frame that gives them meaning.
Land, line, and the ancestors
To a ni-Vanuatu, land is not a possession but the root of who one is. A person belongs to a place, is a man or woman of that ground, and draws from it their name, their kin, their standing, and their tie to the ancestors who lie buried in it. The land holds the line, and the line holds the land; people live on or near the ground of their lineage, and to be cut off from it is to be cut off from oneself. This is why land sits at the very centre of Vanuatu's life and law, and why, at the moment the country became its own, all the land was returned to the indigenous custom owners, taken back from the planters and settlers of the colonial age and vested again in the lines that had always belonged to it.
How the line runs differs across the islands, and here too Vanuatu refuses a single rule. In much of the country a person belongs to their father's line, and land and standing pass from father to child; in parts of the north, on islands such as Pentecost and Ambae, it is the mother's line that carries them, and a person's place comes through their mother and her brothers. Either way the principle is the same: one is born into a lineage rooted in a particular ground, and one's whole identity grows from that root.
The ancestors are not distant in this world but near, and the bond to them is part of the bond to the land. Their spirits are held to remain in the places they lived, their bones often laid near the meeting ground of the village, and the living keep up the relationship through ceremony and through the kava drunk at dusk, when men are said to draw close to the spirits of those who went before. To hold land, to know one's line, and to keep faith with the ancestors are three faces of one thing, the deep Melanesian sense that a person is not an individual alone but a living link in a chain that runs from the first ancestors through the ground itself to the children not yet born.
The grade society and the chief
In much of Vanuatu a man is not simply born to authority but earns it, climbing a ladder of ranks by giving great feasts and killing pigs. This is the graded society, called nimangki on Malekula and by other names elsewhere, and in its fullest form it has many rungs, more than thirty on some islands. A man takes each grade by buying it from one who already holds it, paying in pigs and other wealth and feasting the community, and with each grade he gains a new name, the right to wear certain marks and perform certain rites, and a greater share of mana, the power and standing that rank confers. The lowest grades are taken young with a pig or two; the highest demand a fortune in pigs, the great tuskers among them, killed before the whole community.
In this northern way, leadership is achieved rather than inherited, and a telling measure of a man is not what he keeps but how much he can give away. The southern islands lean the other way, toward titles and rank passed down by birth, and the centre keeps older Melanesian patterns again, so that there is no single rule of chiefs across the country. The very idea of one chief with authority over a whole region owes something to the Europeans, who looked for a single man to deal with; in the older order there were ranked men of greater and lesser influence, each holding sway chiefly within his own community.
The seat of all this is the nakamal, the men's meeting house and ground at the heart of the village. There the men gather, the chiefs and the graded men foremost, to debate the affairs of the community and to settle its disputes, talking until they reach a common mind, for decisions are made by consensus rather than by command or count. The nakamal is also where the kava is drunk at evening, so that the governing of the village and its nightly gathering are one and the same place. Above the villages sits a national council of custom chiefs, which advises the modern state on matters of custom, language, and land, and stands as the country's emblem of kastom in its dealings with the government.
The pig, the tusker, and the mat
The wealth that powers all of this is, first of all, the pig. Across Vanuatu a pig is not mere livestock but a measure of worth, of power, and of prestige, and the most prized of all is the tusker. By pulling the upper teeth of a boar, the people let its lower tusks grow unopposed, curling over the years into a full circle and sometimes a second, and such a tusk, grown through patience and care, is a treasure; the more complete the circle, the greater its worth. The curved boar's tusk is so bound up with value and standing that it stands among the emblems of the nation and is shown upon its flag. Pigs are killed and given at every grade-taking, every wedding, every reconciliation, and the killing is the point, the giving away of wealth being the very act that raises a person's name.
Beside the pig stands the mat. Women weave from pandanus the fine mats that are the other great valuable of Vanuatu, some of them dyed and worked so finely that they serve as a kind of money, the red mats of the northern islands above all. Mats are stored, treasured, and given by the hundred at the great occasions, and a woman's skill at making them builds the standing of her household much as a man's pigs build his. Shell beads worked into armbands and chest-pieces, and the yams, taro, and kava roots that the people call the wealth that grows from the ground, complete the store of traditional riches.
What ties this wealth into the life of the people is that it is made to move. At a birth, an initiation, a marriage, or a death, pigs and mats and kava pass in great formal exchanges between the father's side of a family and the mother's, binding the two lines together through what flows between them. When a quarrel has broken the peace, it is mended in the same coin: a reconciliation is sealed by the giving of pigs and mats before the chief, the wealth changing hands to wipe out the wrong and restore the bond. To hold wealth in Vanuatu is to hold it in order to give it, and in the giving to make and mend the ties that hold a community together. The fine mat and the tusker carry here the meaning that bead money carries in Palau and the woven valuables in Samoa and Tonga, the riches of a culture in which to give well is to be of worth.
Kava and the nakamal
At dusk across Vanuatu the men go to the nakamal to drink kava, the drink pressed from the root of a pepper plant, and the kava of these islands is among the strongest anywhere. The root is ground or pounded, mixed with a little water, and strained, and the drink is taken in quiet, a shell or a cup at a time, followed by a span of stillness in which a man sits with his thoughts as the kava takes hold. It is the daily ritual that closes the day, and far more than a pastime: kava is the drink of custom, taken to seal agreements, to welcome and to honour, to settle quarrels, and to draw near to the spirits of the ancestors.
The place of the drinking is the nakamal itself, which in the village is the men's house and meeting ground and in the towns has become the kava bar, marked at evening by a single dim lamp. Traditionally it is a men's ground, entered and used by custom, and a hush hangs over it that sets it apart from the noise of a bar in other lands; people speak low, and the gathering is calm. To drink kava in the nakamal is to take part in the oldest daily institution of ni-Vanuatu life, the meeting of the men over the bowl that is at once the village's rest, its council, and its link to the world of the ancestors.
For the visitor, kava is the readiest door into the culture, offered freely and widely, but it is approached with respect: one drinks when served, keeps the quiet of the place, and follows the lead of the men whose ground it is. The earthy, numbing drink is an acquired taste, and its calm settles slowly, but to share it is to be admitted, for an evening, into the heart of a Vanuatu community.
The Nagol, sand drawing, and the dances
Vanuatu is the home of one of the most astonishing rites in the world, the Nagol, the land-diving of Pentecost Island. In the months of the yam harvest the men of the island build tall towers of timber and vine, and one by one they climb them and leap, with only two vines tied to their ankles to catch them, falling head first so that the crown or the shoulders just brush the earth before the vines snap taut. It is done to bless the coming yam harvest and as a proof of a young man's courage and passage to manhood, and it is the rite from which the modern sport of bungee jumping was copied, though the divers of Pentecost trust their lives to forest vine and a perfect reckoning of the fall.
Quieter but no less remarkable is the art of sand drawing. With a single finger a master traces an unbroken line through smoothed sand or ash, looping and crossing over a grid in one continuous motion until a complex and perfectly balanced design appears, and the finished pattern is not mere decoration but a carrier of meaning, recording a story, a place, a genealogy, or a piece of knowledge that the drawer reads back from the lines. The art is so distinctive that it is counted among the treasures of the world's heritage, a writing in sand by which the people held and passed on what they knew.
Dance and music carry the same weight of meaning across the islands. Each place has its own dances, drummed out on tall slit-gongs carved from tree trunks and stood upright in the dancing ground, among them the masked Rom dance of Ambrym, the island of magic, and the days-long Toka of Tanna. The dancers wear masks, paint, and the ornaments of their kastom, and the dance enacts the legends and the spirits of the people, so that here too, as in the leap and the line in the sand, the culture holds its memory not in writing but in the body and the act.
The village and its courtesies
Life in Vanuatu is lived in the village, a close community on its own ground under its chief, and a visitor enters it as a guest who must observe its order. The first courtesy is to ask: away from the places set up for tourists, one does not simply walk into a village but seeks the leave of the chief to enter, an acknowledgement that the ground belongs to the community and its custom. To be welcomed is to be brought, in some measure, under the chief's care and the village's rules for the length of one's stay.
Within the village the courtesies are those of respect and of place. The nakamal and the ground around it are the men's, and entered by custom; certain spots are tabu, sacred or forbidden, and not to be walked on or photographed without leave, for they may belong to the spirits or the dead. Dress is modest, the more so away from the resorts, and a calm and unhurried manner is the proper bearing; loud or pushing ways read as disrespect. One asks before taking a photograph of a person, a dance, or a ceremony, for much of what looks like spectacle is in truth sacred or owned, and not free for the taking.
Over the village, as over most of the country, lies the rhythm of the church, and Sunday is kept quiet and given to worship and rest. The week turns on the garden and the nakamal, the women tending the food gardens of yam and taro that feed the family, the men gathering at evening over the kava, and the whole community bound by the labour, the giving, and the gatherings that kastom asks of its members. The courtesies of the village are simply the daily shape of kastom, the respect by which a person honours the ground, the chief, the ancestors, and their own place among them.
Church and kastom
Vanuatu today is a strongly Christian country, the faith brought by missionaries in the nineteenth century and now holding the great majority of the people. The largest church is the Presbyterian, with Anglican, Catholic, Adventist, and a growing number of Pentecostal and other churches besides, and across the islands Sunday is the still centre of the week, the villages gathered for worship and the gardens left to rest. The church has become woven into village life, and for most ni-Vanuatu there is no contradiction in being at once a faithful Christian and a keeper of kastom, the two held together as the inheritance of a single people.
The coming of the church was not gentle, for the early missionaries often took the old ways for darkness and pressed their converts to give up the dances, the kava, and the rites of kastom as the price of the new faith. Against that pressure, and against the strangeness of colonial rule, there rose on the island of Tanna in the last century one of the most remarkable religious movements of the Pacific, the John Frum movement. Its followers look for the return of a spirit figure, John Frum, who will come bringing the wealth and goods of the outside world and will restore the old ways and the freedom of the island; the movement drew strength from the sudden riches the people saw when American forces passed through in the world war, and it endures to this day, with its own followers and even its voice in the nation's parliament.
Tanna holds a second movement as strange and as sincere, which reveres the late Prince Philip of Britain as a divine figure, the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit foretold to cross the seas and return. These movements are easy to treat as curiosities, but they are something more serious: the effort of a people to make sense of the outside world that broke in upon them, and to hold to their own land, wealth, and custom against it, in the language of the sacred. They are kastom and the new world reckoning with one another, which is the deep story of religion across all of Vanuatu.
The nation
The Republic of Vanuatu is a country of about three hundred thousand people spread along a chain of some eighty islands that runs for hundreds of miles down the southwestern Pacific. Its capital and only real town of size is Port Vila, on the island of Efate, with a second town, Luganville, on Espiritu Santo to the north; the great majority of the people live in the villages of the other islands, by the garden and the sea. The country came late and unusually to nationhood. Through the colonial age it was the New Hebrides, and it was ruled, alone among the world's territories, by two powers at once, Britain and France together in an awkward joint government, until in 1980 it threw off both and became Vanuatu, a name meaning our land forever.
The life of the country still rests on the ground and on kastom. Most ni-Vanuatu live by the garden, growing yam, taro, and the other root crops, raising pigs, and fishing, within the web of custom, chiefs, and exchange this guide has described, and this rooted self-sufficiency is part of why Vanuatu has more than once been named among the happiest places on earth by those who measure such things. Cash comes from tourism, from the sale of crops, and increasingly from the men and women who go for seasons of work in the orchards of New Zealand and Australia and send their earnings home.
The islands carry hard burdens too. They lie in the path of fierce cyclones, one of which laid waste much of the country in 2015, and among active volcanoes, one of whose eruptions has emptied a whole island in living memory, and the rising sea presses on their shores. Through it all Vanuatu holds, more firmly than almost any nation of the region, to kastom, to the land and the line and the pig and the feast, and carries that inheritance, the densest weave of languages and customs on earth, into a modern world that presses ever harder on its shores. It remains, as its name says, the people's land forever.