Turning Back the Clock

(4 of 4)
Perhaps Tanna's most fascinating dialogue between the old and the imported can be found an hour's bumpy drive south of Lenakel, past beaches covered in glittering black sand, to Green Point. About 3,000 villagers here are ardent members of the John Frum Movement, which follows the teaching of a European-looking spirit-man who they say appeared to senior men in the area just before World War II, urging them to reject missionary rule and return to kastom living. Green Point men, sitting under the fern-clad branches of an enormous banyan tree, say Frum's original name was Brum, or broom, referring to the need to "sweep out" foreign influences that threatened traditional lifestyles.

He called Tanna's chiefs together and predicted the coming of new and strange objects and ideas. "He said there is a big boat coming, a plane and the icebox, the truck, and this place will be different," says senior man Johnson Kuanu. Some new things, he told them, would be good, including parts of Christianity, and some bad. "He said we had to be careful." Along a winding track leading from the banyan, a wind-blown cliff looks down to where the forest surges to meet the sand. This is where John Frum is believed to have first appeared, and where the sacred stones he left behind are still watched over. When he disappeared at the end of 1942, he promised to come back one day. "People still hope that he is coming," says Kuanu.

Across the island, near the vast plain of gray ash that lies at the foot of rumbling Mt. Yasur, other John Frum believers see things differently. Here, every Friday around 8 a.m., the village of Lamakara falls still as three men disappear into a hut, where they change from faded T shirts and trousers into smart tan military uniforms. They then solemnly raise the flags of the U.S., France and Australian Aborigines, with whom they feel solidarity over land rights. When chief Isaac Wan appears, other men regard him with grave respect: they believe he is John Frum's prophet. The gray-bearded Wan says he was chosen by Frum himself as an infant. John Frum, "dressed all in white," he says, here too urged people to stick to kastom, but went to Green Point only after appearing at nearby Sulphur Bay, initially as a lion. He promised too that Americans, many of whom were stationed on the main island of Efate during World War II, would one day bring development to the area.

Chief Numake isn't a John Frum man, though he says his grandfather was the last chief to shake the mysterious visitor's hand. He sees in the movement echoes of his adopted faith - the figure in white, staying for several years before disappearing but promising to return - and says the blend makes sense on Tanna. "When Tannese first converted, we were in a dim light," he says, looking over the glistening sea. "But after John Frum came we knew our kastom should not be destroyed, that you can be Christian but know your culture as well." Which is perhaps why on Tanna, you will find pastors drinking kava, and kastom men flying foreign flags.