Friendship, Fruits and Fireworks

Gail Varga
Jun 18, 2019
8 min read

The island of Tanna is indeed an exotic and bizarre mixture of things. On the one hand, it is perhaps Vanuatu’s most sought after tourist destination due to the existence of Mt Yasur, ‘the world’s most accessible active volcano’ (wikipedia), and on the other, it is absolutely primitive, self-possessed and on a completely different path than the ‘developed world’ (meaning this in a completely positive way).

After enjoying being the only white people around on the last island, the anchorage now hosted a handful of boats, and ashore I saw smatterings of paying tourists who were staying in some sort of accommodation elsewhere, and there were even a couple of rich white lonely male tourists with personal drivers in pick-up trucks with the best suspension on the island having personal, photo-opportunity tours of primitivism, a sight I found quite movingly sad. The signs of the white visitors were here and there…

Things were out of whack because of all this: silly prices were asked for services (and some non-services) in a feigning of capitalist entrepreneurialism which was so ridiculous it was sometimes more akin to begging with a sense of humour. But overall it represents a good effort on the part of the locals to ‘give us what we want’, and they have cottoned onto the reality that the white people are all there to enjoy touching something primal in living nature, in dramatic geology, in cannibal-tinged history and in the locals of today (with a bit of pseudo extreme sport thrown in). Albeit in a somewhat less tour-guided way, I too enjoyed all these things: hiking in the forest where banyan trees were two-a-penny, huge vines and climbers bedecked everything in layer upon layer of dark greens,

and the strangest leaves swept my legs at the path-side;

hanging out in the villages and beaches talking to whomever I met;

snorkelling the reefs;

plunging some waves on the open ocean side and suchlike.

My one concession to the tourist silliness was the volcano, which cannot be seen otherwise, and I considered would be a great pity not to experience. I was correct! The safety precautions certainly did not further justify the inflated price: we were passionately entreated to stay behind the guide at all times, and yet she sat down behind us and began looking at her mobile phone as soon as we reached the crater rim, where there was only one stretch of one-stick fencing, most of which had fallen into the crater. The rest of the rim was simply gloriously itself, and possibly, yes, a bit dangerous, especially considering that half our party seemed to be backpacker-aged city youths who most certainly knew how to operate a lift, but might be shaky when it came to stairs.

I had a frisson of oo-la-la standing shoulder to shoulder with a party of visiting US/Aus volcanologists (staying for a week and not ‘with’ us in any way), shunning the tourist crush, yet all of us had our attention locked on the bubbling lava in the heart of one of the two adjacent craters, which erupted every few minutes, sending blobs of lava more than 100m in the air, sometimes above our heads, accompanied by a gut-jiggling BOOM! And all this within a desert of grey ash which quickly bordered on tropical jungle, backdropped by huge green-swathed hills, which then fell away to tropical blue sea: it was a feast for the imagination and the senses one could truly glut upon.

My astonishment that this ‘tour’ did not lose its clientele into the abyss regularly rose as the stunning sunset passed and night fell!!! The only light up there was the lava! My thoughts turned to hell as it all began to look and feel more and more like something out of a 19th century engraving in a persuasive religious text tending toward fear-inducing imagery for the purpose, but somehow, as far as I know, we all made it back.

Not all Tanna’s nodding to the western world was ridiculous though. Visiting the capital, Lenakel, I happened upon World Environment Day in full flow right opposite the veggie market: after the dancing and hip-swinging of the market ladies, top environment ministers from the capital gave informative speeches to the gathered crowds, which included ALL the schoolchildren from the entire island.

The message was that each person as an individual must act responsibly in relation to pollutants and climate change. Having already noted that each home had a pit for burning (mainly plastic) waste, I questioned one of the organisers about the wisdom of handing out bottled water in the heat, as they were. I was relieved to discover that, yes, they had at least noticed the ambiguous message there and assured me that the public had been asked to either re-use the bottles or return them (although to where was never made clear).

Even after the happy fellowship I had encountered on Aneityum, the settlements on Tanna oozed contented community to a really exceptional level. Everyone helps with everything. Housebuilding projects are underway with many hands on the job, from about 5 years old and up, all with tools in their hands. I meet Jack on the beach starting some routine maintenance on the outboard motor for the only vaguely powerful boat on the island (150Hp), which is communally owned. He does little apart from direct the energies of his dozen-strong work-team, who are all under 9. The smaller ones pay attention to what is happening, between games, and the slightly larger ones are busy with the real job. Nothing is out of place or unusual. Teams of adult workers are stationed along the roads clearing back the vigorous plant growth with machetes and rakes and the like, all by hand, lots of hands, men, women and youths. I cannot go ashore and have a chat with the folk I meet without coming home with fresh garden produce, to the point where the boat is overflowing with local fruits and I have to stack them on the deck. No payment is ever asked for. When Chief Narua of Port Resolution proudly emphasises to me that no-one goes hungry in his settlement, I wonder how much of an idea he really has that in the ‘rich’ West people do go hungry and, perhaps more significantly, huge numbers of people are lonely, stressed, unhappy with who they are, or do not feel they have their right place in society, not to mention that elderly people are disrespected and shoved into ‘homes’, which would be anathema to them.

Ashore I again find myself happily reading with the schoolchildren. I am lucky to encounter their most recent topic: cultural symbols. I learn about the importance of the curly tut blong pig (tooth belonging to the pig, pig’s tusk), which, alongside the namele leaf, is the emblem on the flag of Vanuatu, and did my best to answer their questions about my cultural symbols. Questions like, ‘What is tapu?’ (what is taboo, or forbidden) do not readily translate, because for something to be forbidden in the west, it is usually a matter of law and has no traditional, ancient custom, ritual or spiritual element as it does for Ni-vans. Many small, puzzled faces surrounded me!

On Tanna I also unwittingly invented another special way to place myself amongst the community: drawing. It sounds unlikely, and certainly was not contrived to be so, but when I sat down by the track with my big sketchpad and begin doing pencil drawings of the native trees I generated an unbelievable amount of interest. Adults stopped to philosophise, youths were gentle and curious, told me their dreams, and the smaller children sat around me in small groups for twenty minutes at a time, inspecting my strange straight blonde hair (I’m pretty sure for head lice – many were scratching - as well as for its weird qualities), whispering and giggling, or brandishing their slingshots (which incidentally, are used for killing fruit bats, which they eat, not just for play).

My bag came home every time laden with papaya, soursop, sugar cane, manioc and more, all given to me within minutes of being harvested, often by children, who work alongside their parents to grow food.

I am reassured by locals that everyone is free to worship at whichever church they like, or no church at all, and again and again I come across a strong determination to hold onto their remaining traditional customs, native languages and culture, including from teachers involved in curriculum building. The changes wrought by missionaries and other contact with whites has caused much of their culture to disappear for good, and I am always disturbed by islanders gratitude to missionaries for ‘saving’ them from their own culture and religion, so the Tanna initiatives are a welcome change.

I brushed up against The John Frum Cargo ‘Cult’ (as it has been named, somewhat disparagingly I feel). For those who haven’t heard about this, it is a religion based upon the visitation of thousands of US military personnel during WWII, who turned up with uniforms, weapons, and ‘cargo’ (in other words, all kinds of stuff that they did not make). For the locals, having already had contact with French and British colonists who similarly commanded ‘cargo’ to appear by simply preparing a piece of paper and then waiting for it to arrive, the US troops took this to a whole new level with all their machinery of war. Not only this, but the US won hearts damaged by the class-ridden hierarchical exploitation of the colonial Europeans, when it displayed its very egalitarian, classless values and, on the contrary, enlisted Ni-vans, uniformed them and trained them as equals to their own men. They left as suddenly as they had come, dumping large amounts of military gear in the ocean before they went, but leaving a deep impression, which shortly afterwards manifested as a vision of ‘John Frum’, and American man on the beach, who foretold the second coming of an American man to save Ni-vans.

There are stranger and less strange aspects to John Frum, but overall it seems based on more tangible realities than many religions, and is clearly still evolving. When asked about the religion, Sarah told me casually, ‘Oh, they’ve split’. Apparently Wednesday JF worshippers have not entirely shunned the church, but the hardcore Friday 6pm-6am worshippers have. She describes both as ‘mostly a music group’, which sets my imagination going: old GI songs perhaps?

In a way the whole thing emphasises Tannans suggestibility, but perhaps that is the same as human suggestibility, just that we have legitimised and become accustomed to the things to which we are suggestible. What really stays with me in a large and present way is the blindingly obvious but rarely noticed observation the locals make about whites: that they don’t make anything, or do anything for themselves. In Tanna, there still seem to be very few things that people do not make. There are the usual few imported, plastic goods, or plastic-wrapped low-quality food, a few people I see have phones (and the signal tower works!), there are a couple of communally-owned cars which take children to school and suchlike… But these do not feature highly and, in general, people build their own houses (communally), grow or catch their own food (fruit, veg, fish, pig), children play with homemade toys (sticks with wheels, for instance), and daily use homemade tools (fishing rods, bows and arrows, slingshots) or machetes and spades and the like, which might, at least at some point in the past, have been bought. How capable they are! How clever they are! How happy they are! And what can we say against that? (...And how does western culture compare?)

Leaving Tanna, we left in the early morning, early enough to still see the glow from the bubbling lava of Mt Yasur, and all day and until the next island we sailed under the trail of its dusty, vaporous trail...