Turning Back the Clock

Facing each other in a tight circle, fingers spread and palms making a sharp crack as they clap, the men of the village of Ianapus tattoo the dark ground with their rhythmic stomping. In contrast to the chaotic rainforest that covers most of their island of Tanna, the surface of the men's dancing ground is bare earth, compacted and smooth from countless years of ritual. Today their strong voices sing here for the success of the yam harvest and the bounty of gardens to come. Young boys, clad like their fathers and uncles only in the nambas, or penis covering, join in, listening intently to the rites they will inherit. A few kilometers away is a small building with a handful of computers in it, but these children will probably never sit in front of them or in any school. The way most of their parents see it, the village is the only classroom they will ever need.

About 900 Tannese live in Ianapus, a hamlet where the laden branches of wild mandarin trees hang over small, dark-roomed dwellings thatched with leaves, and dogs and pigs lie in the dust. The tourists who fly half an hour south to Tanna from Port Vila, the capital, come mainly to see the molten belching of Mt. Yasur, the island's live volcano, and rarely visit places like this, self-sufficient communities connected to the world beyond their borders by little more than a web of narrow walking tracks. Money isn't seen here much, either. While few Tannese villagers still favor the nambas or grass skirts seen in Ianapus, most still live the kastom way, following traditional codes and hierarchies that have survived 160 years of contact with the outside world. They are lucky, for the land is usually so fertile that people have plenty of time to tend their culture as well as their crops of taro or kava. Even as the modern world encroaches, the old ways hold fast. On Tanna, home of chocolate-colored butterflies and nights perfumed by huge orange trumpet lilies, you can find resorts and fancy foreign wine, but never far away are the tupunis, the men who believe they can conjure up cyclones or sunshine with their special stones.

Chief Tom Numake was a tupunis once, until he set aside the powers he inherited from his father and chose the Bible 30 years ago. A former president of Vanuatu's National Council of Chiefs, he is among the most senior of Tanna's 300 chiefs in a community where such men still wield great power. It was his idea to make Tanna the only island to record its kastom law in writing, a feat it completed in 1995, and though he worships in a church, at the same time Numake lives very much as kastom dictates. He embodies the meeting of two worlds found in many of his fellow ni-Vanuatu: a Western-dressed world traveler with a mobile phone and a partnership in the island's most upmarket resort, he consults healers who specialize in ridding people of curses, and talks with the spirits from which his island sprang.

Tanna's brushes with the outside world have not always been happy. Explorers, whalers, traders and blackbirders snatching laborers for the canefields of Queensland all figure in the island's memory. Missionaries arrived in the 1840s; the sterner among them tried to stamp out the arranged marriages, kava drinking and other rituals that underpin Tannese kastom life. Today, a jumble of Christian groups still jostle for believers. But the history of contact is brief enough that the first local person to fly in a plane - a young woman sent because the chiefs were suspicious of the strange craft - is still alive. The world remains quieter here, the green-leafed silence interrupted perhaps by the crepuscular hum of insects, or the morning call of the cone shell, blown at this time of year, when circumcision rituals are taking place.

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