Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [40]
It is grim stuff. Perusing the country’s history, one begins to realize that Vanuatu is like the Russia of the South Pacific, a place of endless calamities. Most of the misery that befell Vanuatu, alas, is hardly unique. To this day, as Rwanda and Yugoslavia demonstrate, we still find a reason to kill our neighbors. And the diseases that wiped out the Ni-Vanuatu were the same diseases that brought the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the cusp of extinction. A first encounter with someone from the Eurasian landmass was very often the equivalent of a death sentence for the rest of humanity, who had the misfortune of residing in places bereft of the cows and horses and other domesticated animals that conferred a measure of immunity. All this I understood. What continued to baffle me, however, was cannibalism. Not the occasional ceremonial cannibalism, not cannibalism as vengeance, not the I really need to eat kind of cannibalism. What perplexed me was the almost casual nature of cannibalism in Vanuatu, its everydayness. As far as I understood, there was neither shame nor reverence attached to the eating of people. A body was just a meal. Clearly, there must be something more to it, or at least I hoped there was. To find out, I figured, I would have to ask a cannibal. And if there was one island where I thought I might find a cannibal, it was Malekula.
UPON INDEPENDENCE in 1980, Vanuatu shed its colonial designation—the New Hebrides—and assumed its current name. Vanuatu derives from vanua, the word for “land” in many Pacific languages. Most newly independent nations would take this as just the beginning. The names of towns would change. Street names would no longer honor King Leopold or some other distant tyrant. Islands and provinces would assume their original, precolonial place-names. Not so in Vanuatu. Indeed, our neighborhood in Port Vila still retained the name given to it by American soldiers in World War II: Nambatri, pidgin for “number three.” Nambatu was just down the road, which led to Nambawan, or downtown. It was much the same throughout the islands, where many bays, lagoons, points, and even mountains retained the names given to them by Westerners. Even many of the islands themselves kept the names bestowed by the first foreign visitors. Captain Bligh didn’t even set foot on the Banks Islands, which he named for Joseph Banks, the naturalist. Of course, he was in a hurry at the time, having recently lost his ship The Bounty to Christian Fletcher and his fellow mutineers, and after his open longboat was chased by cannibals when he passed through Fiji, he knew that this was the wrong neighborhood for dillydallying. There have, however, been some modifications to island names. Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, when he landed on Vanuatu’s largest island in 1606, believed he had discovered the mythical southern continent, and he named it Australia del Espíritu Santo. The Australia part was dropped, however, when someone found another Australia, and today the island is called Espirítu Santo, or just Santo.
One can understand the reticence of the Ni-Vanuatu when it comes to changing their islands’ names. If, for example, the people of a particular island speak twenty languages, there are likely twenty different names for the island, and so settling on a local word for their home is bound to be difficult. Nevertheless, if there is one island where one would think that its inhabitants would make the effort, it would be Malekula. Like so many islands in the South Pacific, Malekula was named by the intrepid Captain Cook, who stumbled upon it in July 1774, during his second great voyage of discovery when he was captain of the Resolution. He called