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By Root 914 0

sharing so little land to speak so many languages. A quick glance at the early literature on Vanuatu provides a clue. The year 1893 saw the publication of the intriguing tome Cannibals Won for Christ, which was soon followed by My Adventures Among South Sea Cannibals, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands, and 1922’s seminal Cannibal-land. Colorful titles all—at least I certainly thought so. What the books so subtly referred to was the lusty appetites Vanuatu men had for other men. Cannibalism was rife in the islands, and that small fact, I deduced, was why the Ni-Vanuatu went to such trouble to avoid one another. Imagine, if you will, going for a stroll through the forest, where you chance upon a few men from the neighboring village. Elsewhere in the world, one might spend a couple of minutes idly talking about the weather, local politics, or real estate prices and then, with a friendly wave, wander on. Or perhaps you would ignore each other completely. In Vanuatu, however, you’d better run like hell, for if you were captured by your neighbors, you could be assured that, very shortly, you would be shat out their backsides.

Surely, you think, this was all a very long time ago. A century or two of contact with other cultures must undoubtedly have tempered habitual cannibalism. And it did, though not before scores of missionaries and sailors ended their days by stewing in a pot. But tradition has a way of hanging on. The last officially recorded incident of cannibalism in Vanuatu was in 1969 on the island of Malekula. I was born in 1969, and while I am willing to concede that 1969 is rapidly receding into the dim mists of time, it wasn’t that long ago. Humor me. It seemed to me that if people were still officially gnawing at human limbs in 1969, it was more than possible that, since then, there had been some off-the-books cannibalism going on in Vanuatu. Our companions in Port Vila agreed. On Ambrym, they said. It’s the island of black magic. Or on Malekula, particularly among the swaggering Big Nambas.

But, of course, it is not all cannibalism in Vanuatu. We are, after all, more than what we eat. On many islands, the inhabitants still live according to the tenets of kastom, the venerable traditions and beliefs that have infused Ni-Vanuatu culture since long before ships arrived from the West bearing muskets and missionaries. While the Ni-Vanuatu may have abandoned the consumption of human flesh, many still cling tenaciously to the old ways, in which the curve of a pig’s tusk is of far greater value than the thinness of a flat-screen television. This is a world of spirits, magic, and sorcery, where an enemy can be slain with the right spell. But kastom, a pidgin word meaning “custom,” manifests itself differently on each of the islands in Vanuatu. On Pentecost Island, for example, there are land divers, courageous boys and men who leap from homemade towers that soar upwards of ninety feet with nothing more than a vine tethered to their ankles, then plummet, grazing the hard earth with their hair, thus ensuring a successful yam harvest. On a few islands, however, the peculiarities of local culture have been infused with the peculiarities of the Western world, with the result that some villagers fly the U.S. Navy flag and march like American soldiers in the fervent hope that one day soon an enigmatic stranger will visit them bearing U.S. Army surplus material.

Yes, it is an odd country, made odder still by its colonial history. I had a hard time imagining the British and the French sharing anything but a healthy disregard for each other, but before Vanuatu’s independence in 1980, the two countries jointly ruled the islands, which were then known as the New Hebrides, or Nouvelles-Hébrides, as the other half preferred. The two colonial powers spent the entire era, nearly a hundred years, crudely trying to undermine each other, with the result that today half the country is francophone while the other half leans anglophone—this in addition to the myriad indigenous languages. Naturally, for the Ni-Vanuatu to be able to communicate