Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [63]
“Do not go too far,” Joseph warned us. “This is the highest point. There,” he said pointing to his right, “is lower. More chance of magma going over the rim.”
The sun rose, and the contrast between the expanse of the volcano and the rest of Tanna was stark. The island was exuberantly alive. We could see the lofty eminences of Mount Tukosmera and Mount Melen, both rising above three thousand feet, with verdant, green ridges, an endless canopy of trees that extended in every direction toward the ocean. But around us, and stretching for a long distance, was nothing but a barren wasteland, populated by car-sized boulders and gray ash.
“Let’s go back to the higher ridge,” Sylvia said. We had wandered a ways around the crater, utterly transfixed by the volcano. Now we noticed that Joseph and Simi had remained on the highest point of the rim, where they crouched down, with one eye on the cauldron and one on us.
“Well, that ought to tell us something,” I said.
The volcano wheezed and trembled. The blasts seemed to shake even the air. We walked back toward where Joseph and Simi stood. Suddenly, the volcano inhaled, a loud, stretched-out wheesh. Time seemed to stop. There was a long, painfully long silence.
The blast brought us to the ground. “Watch where it goes!” I yelled. A long inferno of magma and a cascade of lava bombs stretched high above the rim, up, up it went. The noise was deafening, an ear-puncturing explosion. Black smoke plumed in the crater. We were on our feet now.
“It’s coming down,” Sylvia shouted.
The magma fell back to earth, swallowed by the cauldron. Briskly, we made our way back to Joseph and Simi.
“Thanks so much,” I said as a cloud of ash swirled around us. “We’d like to go down now, please.”
TANNA, AS WE had come to expect of islands in Vanuatu, is remarkably diverse in its population. Nearly thirty thousand people live on the island. There are seven indigenous languages, and the population is more or less divided equally among Presbyterians, kastom believers, and the followers of John Frum. It was this last group that particularly intrigued us. The John Frum Movement is the Pacific’s most notorious cargo cult. Whereas, elsewhere in the world, people had greeted the wonders of Western material goods by asking, How did you make that?, in parts of Melanesia, islanders suddenly confronted by airplanes and refrigerators had asked, Which god will give us loot too? The missionaries weren’t especially helpful on this point. Indeed, the John Frum Movement on Tanna began sometime in the 1930s as a reaction to the increasingly restrictive dictates of the missionaries, who had banned most of the important traditional ceremonies and even went so far as to prohibit the consumption of kava. They were that cruel.
A legend arose—its origins are unclear—that told of a mysterious white man who called himself John Frum. He told the islanders to ignore the missionaries and said that if they resumed the old ways and danced and enjoyed kava, he would return one day bearing Western goods, or cargo. For many, this seemed sensible, and they abandoned the churches, took their children out of the mission schools, and set up new villages, where every Friday they danced until dawn. Most unusual for Vanuatu, the women too were encouraged to drink kava.
In the 1940s, the arrival of World War II convinced the followers of John Frum of the righteousness of their cause. Vanuatu, and particularly the island of Santo, was an enormous staging area for the war in the Pacific. Tens of thousands of soldiers passed through the islands, including James Michener, who subsequently based his book Tales of the South Pacific on his experiences in Vanuatu. The John Frum followers on Tanna took particular interest in the African American soldiers. It was obvious to them that these black soldiers were originally from Tanna, and that they were fighting for John Frum and the liberation of their island. These soldiers, to