Like many of our readers, we did not know much about Vanuatu before we came here. It just seemed like a cool destination in the South Pacific. Now that we’ve been here for a while, we’ve started to learn something about the place, both past and present. And it’s an interesting story.
(Note: the pictures in this post mostly come from the National Museum of Vanuatu here in Port Vila. It’s an interesting little museum but not well maintained, alas.)
The first inhabitants of Vanuatu arrived just over 3000 years ago, about 1300 BCE. That, at least, is when the oldest pottery finds date from. The Lapita culture seems to have originated on the island of Sumatra (in Indonesia). A second wave of settlers arrived about 500 BCE. These were Melanesian people, originally thought to have arrived from New Guinea. But a 2010 genetic survey revealed that the Melanesians are related to the indigenous people of Taiwan! This means that these early peoples navigated over vast tracts of ocean: they must have been exceptional sailors. Far better, in fact, than the Europeans during the famed Age of Exploration in the sixteenth century.
The first Europeans arrived here in the person of the explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, a Spaniard serving the Portuguese crown. He named the place he landed – the largest island – Espiritu Santo (Holy Spirit). It retains that name to this day. The settlement the Spanish established on the island lasted only a few years. The French explorer Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville ‘rediscovered’ the islands in 1768, followed six years later by Captain Cook. He named the islands the ‘New Hebrides’, a name that lasted until independence in the 20th century.
The British were for a long time dominant in this area, but throughout the course of the 19th century the French took on a more prominent role. By the late 19th century the French had built large plantations to grow cotton and, later, sugar cane, coffee, cocoa, bananas, and coconuts. The people who worked these lands were usually enslaved, and often came from elsewhere. (The kidnappers, ‘blackbirders‘, operated throughout the south Pacific and Australia.)
Rivalry between the French and the British led in 1906 to joint rule between the two, known as the ‘Condominium’. The notion of ‘joint’, however, was particularly odd: each country had completely separate governmental offices. The duplication of everything – police, courts, currency, education – led to the nickname ‘Pandemonium’. Indeed, they could not even agree which side of the road to drive on! Not surprisingly, the indigenous population, the Ni-Vanuatu, could not be citizens of either country and were effectively stateless.
Among the other gifts of Europeans to the islands were missionaries; most Ni-Vanuatu today are Christian. But in the 1930s the ‘John Frum’ movement arose in opposition to the missionaries. Believers urged a return to native traditions and claimed that John Frum would return, sweeping away all westerners from the islands (but leaving behind all of their goods). The popularity of this ‘cargo cult’ has varied, but today it has few followers. They do, however, have their own (small) political party in Vanuatu.
In World War II, the United States established a naval base on the island of Espiritu Santo, and 10,000 ni-Vanuatu, serving in their own battalion, supported the Allied forces in the Battle of Guadalcanal (some 800 miles/1300 km northwest of Vanuatu) in 1942-3.
In the 1960s, the first rumblings of de-colonisation came from Britain; France opposed the idea. By the early 1970s there was a native movement afoot for independence. In 1979 foreign owners of land were forced to give it up (they were compensated), but France remained adamantly opposed to independence. The French representative on the island of Espiritu Santo went so far as to get himself declared king of the island! Despite this, the tide had turned, and on 30 July 1980 the Republic of Vanuatu came into being. We happened to be here for the 44th anniversary of independence and joined many Vanuatans in the celebration (see featured image).
Among the many differences from the colonial era is that today only indigenous people can own land in Vanuatu. Foreigners, it is true, can lease land but only for 75 years – that’s their estimate of how long a coconut palm bears fruit.
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