Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [67]
Well, I certainly couldn’t come up with a better explanation. It had been at least four hours since we arrived, and on they danced.
“And you see there?” Kelso pointed to a cluster of elderly men. “Those are the chiefs. They will decide who the women marry.”
Clearly, the stakes were high for those participating in a Nekowiar. Before it ended, however, and the new couples settled down to life in a village destined to be impoverished for the foreseeable future, the participants would have the opportunity to experience a night of debauched mayhem. This would follow the dancing of the toka on the second night of the ceremony, and it is what the chief was referring to when he noted that, for the time being, it remained safe. As the men dance the toka, should they encircle a woman—spectators included—they will toss her in the air. A frenzy is reached, and throughout the night, until the first glimmer of dawn, the participants of the Nekowiar are permitted to have sex with anyone they choose. Afterward, they promise that what happens at the Nekowiar stays at the Nekowiar.
We trudged back down the hill, promising to return the following day to witness the dancing of the toka. We hadn’t decided yet if we would stay through the night and watch the debauchery. Sylvia, of course, was with child, and a frenzied orgy was probably not the most wholesome environment for expectant mothers. There had been disagreement among the Ni-Vanuatu when we asked whether it was even safe for her to attend. Spectators, we had been told, were fair game for the toka dancers. Alas, in the end, it didn’t matter. Disaster struck. In the morning, the sky unleashed a sea of rain. It was unrelenting, and we instead spent the day huddled at the guesthouse. The rain had flooded out a bridge, and until the water receded, we were stuck.
The hours passed. Yaohnanen was unreachable. We scanned the sky, searching for a break in the weather, but it didn’t come. We would miss the toka.
The driver of the guesthouse’s pickup truck was James, and he was as eager to return to the Nekowiar as we were. “I will check through the night,” he said, “and if the bridge is clear, we will go and see the nao.” The nao was danced by the men of the host village on the morning after the toka. It was the culmination of the dancing, and we hoped we’d have the chance to see it. Our flight back to Port Vila left later in the morning.
At 4 A.M., we were summoned. We were seeing a lot more of 4 A.M. than we cared for on Tanna, but this time we hopped into the pickup without complaint. The bridge was still flooded, but the water had receded enough to allow us over. James eased the truck through the muddy track that led up to Yaohnanen.
“This is far as we can go,” he said as we began to slide backward through the mud. We abandoned the pickup and trudged up through the mire, panting and sweating. Ahead of us, we could hear chanting and stomping. We felt a kinetic energy and fairly bristled in anticipation. Emerging from the forest with the first gray light of day, we saw hundreds of people running from one end of the clearing to the other, beckoning the dancers of the nao with a rhythmic cry. The atmosphere was intense, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The people before us had been awake for three nights straight, dancing and fornicating, and now this was the climax.
We found Kelso near the pigs. They would soon be slaughtered for the feast. The young boys were busy chewing and masticating the kava roots, which had been gathered in enormous piles, and soon the Nekowiar would end in a kava dream.
“The chief is very angry,” Kelso told us. “Someone has used black magic.”
“How does he know that someone used black magic?” Sylvia asked.
“The rain,” Kelso said. “Someone used black magic to cause the rain.”
This struck me as a rather benign manifestation of black magic. If one’s magic was powerful enough to change the weather in the South Pacific, I think a snowstorm would have made for a more potent demonstration of one’s mastery of the dark