Top Quotes: “Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu” — J. Maarten Troost

Introduction

“We’re safe now, it began, which I thought was a very lively way to begin an e-mail. The message was a stream-of-consciousness recounting of a very bad day. Gunmen…prime minister held hostage…shooting.. looters…Suva on fire.

Sylvia called. “Did you hear?”

“Yes. But hopefully this will resolve itself soon.”

But it didn’t resolve itself. On that balmy morning in Fiji, a group of men armed with automatic guns and machetes had entered the parliament in Suva, the capital, and taken the prime minister and much of the government hostage.

Typically, the South Pacific receives nary a mention in the world press, with the notable exception of the occasional celebrity sighting in Tahiti. Now, however, the back pages of newspapers around the world were full of stories with headlines like TOURISTS TERRORIZED AT POSH ISLAND RESORT.

There had been a previous coup in Fiji, in 1987, and the wits in the press began to refer to Fiji as “coup-coup land.” We consumed all the news we could find, hoping that the coup would prove to be a mere blip, a temporary usurpation of law and order, and that the tensions would quietly dissolve with a kava ceremony, an apology, a group hug, and the solemn exchange of a whale’s tooth.

But as the hostage drama unfolded over the following fifty-six days, and as we watched aghast as the television broadcast images of Suva in flames, it grew harder to maintain the illusion that this was anything other than a very serious problem. Nevertheless, I kept trying.”

Vanuatu

“The islands are young, temperamental adolescents, prone to mood swings and sudden growth spurts, and it is not uncommon for an island in Vanuatu to experience a sudden jolt and find itself thrust upward another yard or two. Now and then, an island loses it altogether and, in an apoplectic fit, blows itself up entirely, as happened to Kuwae in 1452. And always there are the earthquakes — many, many, earthquakes — that happen each and every day. Most are inconsequential, mere tremors. Though for those, like me, who have never before seen cutlery dance across a table in a restaurant, they can still be vividly disturbing.”

“Not only can the typical Ni-Vanuatu depend on losing his home and livelihood during a cyclone; he can expect this to happen several times over the course of his life. Such is the world that nature has bequeathed to them. It did not surprise me, then, to learn that the water around Vanuatu is also shark-infested.”

“Many Ni-Vanuatu men today wear nothing more than a namba, a modest leaf wrapped around their penis. Naturally, there are Big Nambas and Small Nambas. And they don’t like each other.

Then there are the languages. The two hundred thousand people who call Vanuatu home speak more than one hundred languages. There is no place on Earth that offers more linguistic diversity. On some islands, and these are not large islands, the inhabitants will speak one of more than two dozen local languages, all unintelligible to one another. How can this be? you wonder. These people have been sharing an island for a thousand years, or two, or four, and yet their languages have evolved utterly independent of those of their neighbors, a mere conch-shell blow away. Visiting the islands, one quickly understands that the topography certainly has something to do with it. The islands of Vanuatu are invariably rugged, as one would expect of islands prone to blowing up. And the interiors of most are forbiddingly dense with jungle.”

“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.”

“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 with anyone from outside their village, one more language had to be created: Bislama, an island pidgin. Mixing phonetic English with phonetic French, the Ni-Vanuatu now had a simple way to say “I don’t understand”: Me no save.”

“Efate, we could see, was a dauntingly lush island with a jungle that toppled over steep hillsides, much of it enveloped with the mile-a-minute vine planted by the Americans in World War II-camouflage run amok.”

“Not all Ni-Vanuatu are Christian, of course, though Efate, as the most Westernized island in Vanuatu, has largely been converted. On the outer islands, many retain the old ways and follow the dictates of kastom.”

““Well,” Kathy said, “It’s a great view from here, but don’t be fooled by it. The govemment is incredibly corrupt here. Malaria is a huge problem on the outer islands. Literacy rates are among the lowest in the Pacific. The status of women here is just a fraction higher than that of pigs. And crime is a big problem in Port Vila.”

“Oceania is a world of villages, each with its own rules and traditions. And with strikingly few exceptions, the larger urban areas like Port Moresby are either cesspools of criminality or dissolute slums where the inhabitants drift ever further from the village culture that has sustained them for generations. Port Vila, then, is an agreeable anomaly in the South Pacific. It’s nice.

It wasn’t always so. Like all large towns in the region, Port Vila is a town built by Westerners for Westerners. Indeed, until the 1940s, the Ni-Vanuatu were not even allowed to live in Vila, as the locals call their town. Any Ni-Vanuatu men found wandering about after 9 P.M. were arrested. This, remarkably, was an improvement over the state of affairs that prevailed in the 1880s, when Port Vila was little more than a debauched port for planters, beachcombers, ex-convicts, and blackbirders — rapacious labor recruiters who plied the South Pacific, filling their holds with bodies to send to plantations and mines throughout the Southern Hemisphere.”

“The French busily drew plans for the islands, and then the English erased those plans and created their own, which were then scribbled over by the French, and so on, until finally, exasperated, the two countries drew a line down the middle of the Etch A Sketch. The result was two high commissions, two governments, two official ruling languages, two flags that competed for the loftiest perch, two currencies, two postage stamps, and two educational systems. Depending on where they lived, the Ni-Vanuatu found themselves inhabiting a world that leaned either anglophone or francophone, and each group was told to mistrust the other. As one can imagine, this did nothing for the subsequent stability of independent Vanuatu. In any given year, the government is likely to change as the francophones topple an anglophone government, who then spend their time plotting to remove the francophones.”

“Typically, the upside to living in a poor country is that it’s cheap. But as we settled in Port Vila, I was left utterly stupefied by the prices paid for basic utilities. Though we were very pleased that, unlike in Kiribati, these utilities were at least available in Port Vila, we found ourselves gasping whenever we received a bill. We had a refrigerator and a wall-unit air conditioner that we used only sporadically, and yet our monthly electricity bill was far higher than what we’d paid in Washington, D.C. It was the same with the phone bill. Basic telephone and Internet service cost more than ten times what we’d paid in the U.S., largely because power and telecommunications contracts had been awarded to private French companies. These were monopolies, and anywhere else in the world, utility monopolies would be tightly regulated, but in Vanuatu they were permitted to charge what they pleased. Similarly, basic groceries cost a small fortune. Vanuatu may not have had an income tax, which works out very well if you have a significant income, but it did have a value-added tax, which is not so good if you don’t have much of an income. Most Ni-Vanuatu do not have a significant income. The expatriates, however, did.

If there was one service that did provide good value, it was minibuses. Simply stand alongside a road, and just by subtly quivering a pinky, you will soon see a minibus make a dramatic U-turn, pitch itself on two wheels, career across two lanes of traffic, and shudder to a halt with an emphatic skid in the dirt to pick you up. For less than a dollar, the bus driver will take you anywhere in Vila or its environs, though not necessarily by the most efficient route. The journey from point A to point B is an ever-shifting calculation that depends on where the other passengers are going.”

“Kava is found on most of the islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. It is typically consumed communally, with men gathered around a large bowl, and a host passing a single shell among his guests. No formal event in Fiji or Tonga occurs without kava. But mostly, kava is used as a social lubricant. It is not uncommon for men in Fiji to spend an entire day around the kava bowl, shooting the shit, as it were, as they consume upwards of thirty shells. It’s different in Vanuatu. No one drinks kava during the day. Not even the kavaheads, the true addicts. It is taken only around dusk and into the early hours of the evening. And more interestingly, I thought as I watched a man take his shell and wander away from his companions, one drinks kava alone in Vanuatu.

“What you do is this,” Dirk said. “You take your bowl and find something nice to look at — the sunset, the stars, the trees — something poetic. Then, with that image in your mind, you take the kava all at once.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then you listen to the kava.””

“In a nation a little more than twenty years old, an islander’s primary loyalty was always to his home island. We each took our shell and sought a moment of poetry.”

“IT WAS TWO DAYS before I returned to Earth, and many more before I ventured to another nakamal. I felt like I had been mugged, taken unawares, slugged from behind, and now I was wary. It had been a slow descent, nothing at all like a hangover, just a lingering sense that I was in a place far, far away, in a world of my own.”

“There were hundreds of nakamals scattered throughout town. If one wanted to chat with the minister of agriculture or any other high-level government official, there was a very good likelihood of finding him at Ronnie’s nakamal, near the parliament.”

“After a kava session, there is no desire for food, except, possibly, for a slice of papaya or a banana. Heavy kava users are invariably rail thin. Indeed, the Frenchwomen in Vila were known to use kava as a diet drug.”

“Since then Vanuatu, even by the impressive standards of Melanesia, has been notoriously unstable. Its Big Men plot and maneuver to topple any government not led by themselves. A government rarely lasts longer than a year or two before another Big Man succeeds in buying off a sufficient number of ministers of parliament to enforce a change.”

“Well, surely, you think, attempting to create a private miltia to challenge the country’s security forces would be a career-ender. In Vanuatu, however, this got him a job as minister of finance, and here is where Barak Sope demonstrated his true genius. Say what you will about Sope, but he has gumption. He began a lucrative sideline selling Vanuatu passports, then moved on to issuing official promissory notes worth tens of millions of dollars to an Australian swindler. The financial collapse of the country was prevented only by the intervention of Scotland Yard.

The national ombudsman of Vanuatu, a courageous Frenchwoman who had endured death threats, issued a public report stating that Barak Sope should never again be allowed to participate in the governance of Vanuatu. Barak Sope then became prime minister.

Shortly after we arrived in Port Vila, Prime Minister Sope decided that Vanuatu’s interests could best be advanced by allying itself closely with – of all the countries in the world Laos. Vanuatu, Sope declared, would invest in Laotian agriculture and mining and help finance the country’s infrastructure. For good measure, Vanuatu would also help Laos launch satellites into space. With what? I wondered. A slingshot? Clearly, the prime minister had had a few shells. I wasn’t sure what the Laotian government thought of this sudden benevolence, though 1 did think it telling that the only agreement it signed was one pledging “non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.”

“In Kiribati, for instance, when someone dies, it is customary for family members to partake of the flesh of the decomposing corpse, ladling it into a kind of soup, which is then consumed, ensuring that, for those in bereavement for Grandma, she will always remain a part of them.”

“Until very recently, island life in Vanuatu had been characterized by a state of endless war. This is where my struggle to understand cannibalism begins, for no war seems more pointless to me than the kind traditionally waged in Vanuatu. Typically, the men of a particular village ambushed the men of another village. The goal was to capture one man, who would then be triumphantly carried back to the attackers’ village, clubbed, and chopped into pieces. Good manners dictated that an arm or a leg be sent off to a friendly village.”

“In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the blackbirders began to visit the islands of Vanuatu. Little better than slavers, they were recruiters searching for indentured workers to toil in the mines of New Caledonia and the sugar and cotton plantations of Fiji, Samoa, and Australia. Many Ni-Vanuatu were kidnapped. Most suffered through years of appalling brutality, but if they survived their years of service, they were returned to their islands. Survived being the operative word. Of the forty thousand Ni-Vanuatu lured to Queensland, Australia, fewer than thirty thousand lived to return.”

“On every island touched by Westerners, epidemics followed, and the depopulation of Vanuatu was appalling. In 1800, an estimated one million Ni-Vanuatu lived on the islands. By 1935, there were only 41,000.”

“UPON INDEPENDENCE in 1980, Vanuatu shed its colonial designation — the New Hebrides and assumed its current name. Vanuatu derives from vanua, the word for “land” in many Pacific languages. Most newly independent nations would take this as just the beginning The names of towns would change. Street names would no longer honor King Leopold or some other distant tyrant. Islands and provinces would assume their original, precolonial place-names. Not so in Vanuatu. Indeed, our neighborhood in Port Vila still retained the name given to it by American soldiers in World War I: Nambatri, pidgin for “number three.” Nambatu was just down the road, which led to Nambawan, or downtown. It was much the same throughout the islands, where many bays, lagoons, points, and even mountains retained the names given to them by Westerners. Even many of the islands themselves kept the names bestowed by the first foreign visitors.”

“One can understand the reticence of the Ni-Vanuatu when it comes to changing their islands’ names. If, for example, the people of a particular island speak twenty languages, there are likely twenty different names for the island, and so settling on a local word for their home is bound to be difficult.”

“Sadly, the Malekulans did not write, so we do not have any notes that could tell us what they thought of Captain Cook and his crew, who had spent the previous two years tightly confined in a rat-infested wooden ship, much of it spent in the tropics, without access to a shower or deodorant, and as they were Englishmen in an age before sunscreen, their skin must have been of particular interest to Malekulans, “These Creatures are the most Repellent beasts we have yet encountered,” one can imagine a Malekulan writing, “They have Red skin that flakes and sheds like a serpent, except for the parts that they cover, which is a Hideous white. Many are Furry like our swine and they exhibit a most Malodorous stench. They have no Females among them, and we take them for Sodomites.”

“This better be an interesting island, I thought, and when I noticed the airport building, I realized that it would be.

The building, which had once been a tidy single-story cinder-block structure, had been reduced to a slab of stones and burnt embers. It was not decayed. It was destroyed, though this did not prevent the Vanair representative from conducting his business. He had set up a table in a roofless room, surrounded by rubble and clucking hens, and there he checked in the passengers who were continuing on to Santo.”

“Malekula is predominantly francophone, and so I asked him, in French, about the airport.

“Land dispute,” he said. “The landowner wanted more money from the government. When the government refused to pay, the landowner destroyed the airport building.”

“And is this a common way of settling land disputes?” I asked.

“Very common.””

“Though twenty-eight languages are spoken on Malekula, most of the island’s inhabitants are roughly divided among Small Nambas and Big Nambas. I found it curious that a people’s identity could be defined by the size of the leaf that men wore wrapped around their penises.”

“I asked the chief how they prepared the men they were about to eat. How was the flesh cooked?

“We cut the man into small pieces and put it inside the bamboo. And then we roast it over the fire.”

“Did you use any seasoning?” Well, I was curious.

“No, only the meat.”

“Were there any parts of the man you didn’t eat?” I asked. If I were a cannibal, I figured, there would certainly be a few parts I wouldn’t touch.

“No,” the chief said. “We eat the whole man.” I absorbed this. Then Chief Jamino added: “But not the woman. We don’t eat the woman, and the woman don’t eat the man. The woman was used as a messenger from village to village.”

Well, I thought. There’s at least one upside to being a woman in Vanuatu.”

“Their legs are venomous too. Centipedes can have upwards of three hundred legs. Ponder that, if you will. Now, three hundred legs, of course, need to be connected to something something large enough to carry three hundred legs. You might conclude, then, and rightly so, that Vanuatu centipedes are big, very big. They can grow to be more than a foot long. And they are nearly indestructible. You may think that you’ve solved the problem by chopping a centipede in two, but in fact, what you have just done is create two angry, scurrying missiles of poison.”

Fiji

“They placed their administrative capital on the wettest, grayest sliver of island they could find. I don’t think the French would have made the same mistake. Looking at the weather map of Fiji, one inevitably saw happy sunshine cascading over all the islands except for that one small corner of Viti Levu occupied by Suva, where invariably rain showers were to be expected into perpetuity.”

“It had been a particularly traumatic experience for those in Suva. The front man had been George Speight, a ne’er-do-well son of a politician. He and his co-conspirators had stormed the parliament and taken much of the government hostage, including Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. Speight said that he was acting in the name of indigenous Fijians and promptly declared that, henceforth, all power resided with him. Within hours, thousands of Fijian sympathizers had surrounded the parliament. They encamped there, and soon mob rule descended on Suva. Hundreds of Fijian toughs laid waste to the city. The duty-free shops burned. The cafés were torched. An army of looters carted off stashes of televisions and jewelry, food and perfume. The police disappeared, ceding the city, the pride of English rule in the Pacific, to anarchy.

Elsewhere in the country, long-simmering grievances between indigenous Fijians and Indians had erupted into rolling spasms of violence and intimidation. Between 1879 and 1916, more than sixty thousand Indians had arrived in Fiji as indentured laborers, recruited or tricked into coming by the British, who needed cheap labor to work on the sugar plantations. Most of their descendants still earned their living cutting sugarcane, leasing the land from the Fijians who own 87 percent of all the land in Fiji. With the coup, families who had cultivated the same plot of land for a hundred years and more were suddenly cast out of their homes, expelled from their land, and saw their belongings stripped from them, their men beaten, and their women assaulted. Overnight, Indians who had known no other land than Fiji, shopkeepers and farmers, found themselves living as refugees in their own country. In the following days, the mayhem spread. In the highlands of Viti Levu, Fijian landowners took over the Monasavu Dam, which supplied Suva and much of Fiji’s population with electricity. Increase our payments, they said, or we’ll blow it up. In Savusavu, on the island of Vanua Levu, the Air Fiji pilots were, inexplicably, taken hostage by Fijian nationalists. Turtle Island, a posh, American-owned resort in the Yasawa Islands, was seized by the indigenous landowners. The bewildered tourists were evacuated.

At the parliament, the long siege lasted fifty-six days. The president, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, who is revered in Fiji much as George Washington is in America, was compelled to resign. Elements of the Fijian military also mutinied. At the Queen Elizabeth barracks in Suva, members of the elite Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit turned on the soldiers who remained loyal to the government, killing four of them.

The repercussions of the coup were playing out as we arrived in Fiji. George Speight was eventually arrested and accused of treason. The Indian-led government he deposed, however, was not permitted to return to power. The chiefs in Fiji, who, despite an elected parliament, remained the true power in Fiji, appointed a caretaker government. Many of those presumed to have played a role in the coup found themselves posted to Fijian embassies abroad, as well as to the U.N. in New York.”

“There was, as far as we could tell, not much of the Pacific Grand left to guard. Built in 1914, the two-story hotel had once been the finest in Oceania, with stately colonnades and verandahs set to capture the breeze off Suva Harbor. Alas for the Pacific Grand, it was bought by Nauru, a grim flyspeck of a country that was once among the world’s richest. After squandering the wealth it had derived from its phosphate deposits, Nauru was reduced to penury and today makes its living as a prison island housing Australia’s illegal immigrants. The Pacific Grand Hotel, like most of the properties owned by Nauru throughout the Pacific, had been left to crumble.”

“From our house, we had a view of Nukulau Island, a picturesque islet that had once been the Suva equivalent of Central Park in New York, an outlet for urban steam. It was a picnic island, a place where the inhabitants of Suva took their families for an afternoon of swimming and frolicking. Regrettably, the island had now been transformed into a prison for George Speight and his fellow conspirators.”

“ONE MORNING, WHILE I WAS BROWSING THROUGH THE bookstore at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, I came across a book called Misconceptions, by the writer Naomi Wolf. There had once been a bookstore in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, but it had burned down, leaving the USP bookstore as the last remaining outpost of literature in the South Pacific. Very often, a shop in Fiji would decide to call itself a bookstore, but invariably it sold little more than stationery. As the sole proprietor of books in Oceania, the USP bookshop had a remarkably small selection.”

“No wonder the Fijians looked so fondly upon the British. They brought in Indians to cultivate the land and Solomon Islanders to build the infrastructure, while the Fijians themselves were encouraged to do nothing more than collect the rents.”

“I asked Saresh what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.

“During the coup, it was very bad. They attacked all the Indian houses here. They take the cattle and the goats and the chickens. They take the women. They even took the Air Fiji pilots hostage. It was not so bad in Savusavu, but here,” he said, gesturing toward the hills and the Indian farms, “it was very bad. And in Labasa, it was also very bad.”

Labasa was a town in the north of Vanua Levu. It was largely an Indian town, and since the coup, many of its inhabitants had drifted to Suva looking for work. This had been a region for growing sugarcane, a precarious industry in the best of times. Since the coup, however, many Fijian landowners had declined to renew the leases of Indo-Fijian sugarcane farmers. Expelled from the land their families had farmed for generations, the farmers found themselves in an unenviable situation.”

“The chiefly system that exists today is in fact a legacy of colonial English rule. It was the colonists who created the Great Council of Chiefs to further English power. Today, it is often referred to as the Great Council of Thieves. The chiefly system in Fiji was, at worst, a rapacious kleptocracy and, at best, a stubborn, ill-serving adherence to a colonial era that has long since vanished.

And yet, though colonialism and modernity had changed Fiji, the chiefs still fought the battles of yore. There are three traditional chiefly confederations in Fiji, and the coup can best be understood as a battle among the confederations for preeminence. Racial tensions were not so much a cause of the coup as a weapon the chiefs could use to further their ends. George Speight found himself isolated on Nukulau Island not because he overthrew an Indian-led government but because his actions had forced the resignation of Fiji’s president, Ratu Mara, a preeminent chief. Speight would not have survived a day if he had been placed inside the Suva Prison. The Fijian prisoners who were loyal to Ratu Mara would have killed him in an instant.”

“The villages were being emptied of men, lured by the dollars to be found working for U.S. military contractors in Kuwait and Iraq. More than a few had already returned to Fiji in body bags.”