Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [65]
“And do you dance on Friday nights?” I inquired.
“Yes, all through the night.”
“And do the women drink kava?”
“Yes, women drink the kava.”
Thank goodness for that. But still, we found what he had said rather odd. What we didn’t know at the time was that the John Frum Movement was on the cusp of a schism. Chief Fred had become, in his own way, a Christian. Another chief, Chief Isaac, accused Chief Fred of heresy. Each had his followers, and soon tensions rose. Not long after we left, Chief Isaac and his followers, the true believers of John Frum, were compelled to leave Sulphur Bay. They created a new John Frum village closer to the volcano. And then the two factions began to fight each other with axes and knives, fists and arrows. Police were flown in from Port Vila. War in Vanuatu, whether between tribes or among religions, remains a serious business on the islands. The future began to look bleak for the John Frum Movement.
On that day, however, we had no intimation of what was to follow. Instead, as we rolled over the Ash Plain, under the simmering volcano, back toward Port Resolution, we and William spent the ride trying to figure out a point Chief Fred had missed: Where was Jerusalem?
ONE MORNING ON TANNA, we found ourselves in Yakel, a kastom village in the interior of the island, watching several men wearing nothing more than a namba shuffle and hop, performing what was allegedly an important traditional dance. Yakel is indeed a kastom village—“a glimpse into the Stone Age,” as one enthusiastic visitor had put it. We had been shown where boys were sequestered after their circumcisions. On Malekula it had been a longhouse. In Yakel, it was a treehouse. The villagers’ cyclone shelters were located deep within the roots of massive banyan trees. The homes were rudimentary lean-tos, as likely to be inhabited by piglets as by children. The village itself was a muddy enclave hidden in the depths of the forest.
And yet Yakel accepted visitors. Indeed, when we arrived at a trailhead near the village, we were obliged to bang on the tam-tam. I wasn’t sure why. To give them a chance to get decent? But no—what the tam-tam said to the village of Yakel was that it was time to get ready. It was showtime. The dance area was a lofty plateau with a glorious view of Mount Yasur huffing and puffing in the distance. But as we watched the leaping buttocks and the recoiling testicles, it was hard to feel as if we were participating in anything other than a peculiar peep show.
“You may take the pictures here,” our guide said.
A thousand pictures must have been snapped over the years of the half-naked savages, dancing with their spears, framed by the smoking eminence of Mount Yasur. “And they were cannibals too,” one can imagine a colonist from New Caledonia saying with a smirk.
Indeed, they were. It was one of the first things the islanders had asked Captain Cook: Do you eat people too?
Now, though, the village had the air of spectacle about it. Yes, we wear no clothes. Yes, we believe in spirits—1,000 vatu, please. It wasn’t the villagers I reproached for this but us, the visitors, the voyeurs. I felt awkward being in Yakel. Whenever a visitor arrived, the villagers stopped what they were doing and did a little dance—You can see their balls! The women don’t cover their breasts!—and you got the sense that now that you had been divested of your vatu, they’d prefer that you just shuffle along.
On the morning we visited, however, only a handful of men and women were present in the village, tending to the business of hopping around for travelers.
“Where are the children?” I asked our guide. “Where are the other people?”
“They are at the Nekowiar.”
“The Nekowiar? There’s a Nekowiar this year?”
What luck, we thought. A Nekowiar—an elaborate three-day alliance-making ceremony between two villages—occurs only every three or four years. We had heard rumors in Vila that there was to be one this year. The exact date was always uncertain. The Nekowiar was, we were told, Vanuatu’s grandest bacchanal, and on our return