Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [35]
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