Vanuatu

• 1. A God From Britain

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  On the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, villagers of the Yaohnanen tribe revere Britain's Prince Philip as a god. Their belief rests on an ancient story about the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit. According to the tale, he ventured across the seas to look for a powerful woman to marry. When Philip visited the island with his new wife, Queen Elizabeth II, the villagers concluded that he fit the description exactly.

  After Philip died, an anthropologist familiar with the group said that the villagers would probably finish their mourning and then transfer their veneration to King Charles III. Charles had visited Vanuatu in 2018 and met some of the tribal leaders.

  Vanuatu is an archipelagic country in Melanesia, scattered across the South Pacific Ocean about 1750 km east of northern Australia. Its islands are volcanic, its villages are many, and its past holds some of the Pacific's strangest meetings between cultures. Who first sailed here, and what did they leave behind? What happened when Spanish, French, British and American visitors followed? How did two rival powers come to govern one territory together, and what did that leave for the people who lived there? And how does a country of volcanoes, storms and earthquakes keep going?

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• 2. The Lapita Voyagers

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  About 3,000 years ago, in the period roughly between 1100 BCE and 700 BCE, the first people reached these islands. They were almost certainly part of the Lapita culture. Archaeological evidence gathered since the 1980s overturned an older idea that the Lapita touched Vanuatu only marginally. Their sites now run from the Banks Islands in the north to Aneityum in the south.

  The most striking site is Teouma on Éfaté, where a large ancient cemetery holds the remains of 94 individuals. Other notable Lapita sites include Uripiv and Vao off the coast of Malakula, and Makue on Aore. In 2008 the Lapita sites became Vanuatu's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  Where the Lapita came from is still being pieced together. Their immediate origins lie to the northwest, in the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea. DNA from a 3,000-year-old skeleton found near Port Vila in 2016 suggests that some may have come straight from the Philippines or Taiwan, pausing only briefly on the way.

  The settlers carried yam, taro and banana, along with pigs and chickens. Their arrival coincided with the extinction of several species. Among them were a land crocodile named Mekosuchus kalpokasi, a land tortoise named Meiolania damelipi, and various flightless birds. At their greatest extent, Lapita settlements reached as far east as Tonga and Samoa.

  Much of this story stays hazy. No written sources predate European contact, and only limited archaeological work has been done. Vanuatu's volatile geology and climate have likely destroyed or buried many prehistoric sites.

  Over the following centuries the Lapita culture lost much of its early unity, for reasons that remain unclear. Pottery, settlement and burial practices became more local, and long-distance trade and migration shrank. Some trade endured. Similar late-period items turn up in Fiji, New Caledonia, the Bismarcks and the Solomons, while distinctive adzes in central and southern Vanuatu hint at links with Polynesian peoples to the east.

  The geological record shows that a huge volcanic eruption struck Ambrym. It would have devastated local populations and probably pushed people to move elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Lapita either mixed with or paved the way for migrants arriving from the Bismarcks and elsewhere in Melanesia. The result was the darker-skinned appearance typical of modern Ni-Vanuatu.

  In the 16th and 17th centuries, oral tradition remembers a chief or chiefs called Roy Mata. The name may be a title held by different men over several generations. Roy Mata is said to have united local clans and presided over an era of peace. Sites on Éfaté and the neighbouring islands of Lelepa and Eretoka are linked with him, and they match what oral tradition has passed down. That era of peace belongs to the same centuries in which European ships first came to the islands.

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• 3. Ships And Sandalwood

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  In April 1606, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós sailed from El Callao in the service of the Spanish Crown. He passed the Banks Islands and landed briefly on Gaua, which he called Santa María. Continuing south, he reached the largest island and named it La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, meaning the Southern Land of the Holy Spirit. He believed he had arrived in Terra Australis.

  The Spanish founded a settlement called Nueva Jerusalén at Big Bay on the island's north side. It did not last. Within days relations with the islanders turned violent. When the Spanish tried to make contact, people fled or led them into an ambush. Many of the crew were ill, and Queirós's own mental state was deteriorating. After a month the camp was abandoned, and Queirós went on searching for the southern continent.

  Europeans did not return until 1768, when the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville sailed past on the 22nd of May. He called the group the Great Cyclades. Of the French names he devised, only Pentecost Island has stuck. His crew landed on Ambae and traded peacefully. Bougainville later said they were attacked, and he fired warning shots from his muskets before sailing on.

  Captain James Cook explored the islands extensively from July to September 1774. He named them the New Hebrides, after the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, and the name lasted until independence. Cook handed out presents and avoided violence, so his relations with Ni-Vanuatu stayed generally cordial.

  In 1789, William Bligh and the rest of his crew sailed through the Banks Islands on the way to Timor after the mutiny on the Bounty. Bligh later came back and named the islands after his benefactor Joseph Banks.

  Whaleships were among the first regular visitors. The Rose made the first recorded call in February 1804, and the New Bedford ship John and Winthrop made the last known one in 1887.

  In 1825, the trader Peter Dillon found sandalwood on Erromango. It was highly valued in China as incense and could be traded there for tea. A rush of newcomers followed and ended in 1830, after a clash between Polynesian workers who had come to the island and the local Ni-Vanuatu. More sandalwood turned up on Efate, Espiritu Santo and Aneityum, setting off a series of booms and busts. By the mid-1860s the supply was essentially exhausted.

  During the 1860s, planters in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia and the Samoan islands needed labourers. They encouraged a long-term indentured labour trade called blackbirding. At its height, more than half the adult men on several islands were working abroad. Poor conditions, abuse and common diseases that Ni-Vanuatu had no immunity to caused the population to fall severely. It remains far below its level before contact.

  Greater oversight gradually wound the trade down. Australia barred further labourers in 1906, followed by Fiji in 1910 and Samoa in 1913. In that same year of 1906, France and Britain made a decision of their own about the islands.

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• 4. Two Flags One Territory

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  In 1839, missionaries, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, began arriving, and the first welcome was deadly. That year John Williams and James Harris of the London Missionary Society were killed on Erromango. Others pressed on and won many conversions. To the dismay of the Europeans, Ni-Vanuatu blended Christianity with traditional kastom beliefs.

  Presbyterians did especially well on Aneityum. On Tanna, locals repeatedly chased missionaries off the island through the 1840s-60s, perhaps partly because of the illness and death the newcomers brought. The Anglican Melanesian Mission took young converts to New Zealand and Norfolk Island for further training.

  Henry Ross Lewin, who started a cotton plantation on Tanna in 1865, was the first of the settlers looking for land. He later abandoned it. When cotton prices collapsed after the American Civil War, planters switched to coffee, cocoa, bananas and, most successfully, coconuts. British subjects from Australia made up most settlers at first, but they got little backing from their government and often struggled.

  French planters began arriving with Ferdinand Chevillard on Efate in 1880. In 1882 John Higginson, a fiercely pro-French Irishman, created the Compagnie Caledonienne des Nouvelles-Hébrides. It soon tipped the balance toward French subjects. The French government took the company over in 1894 and actively encouraged settlement. By 1906 there were 401 French settlers and 228 British, nearly two to one.

  Land bought in dubious circumstances caused constant clashes between settlers and Ni-Vanuatu. Near-lawlessness brought petitions asking one or both powers to annex the territory. In 1887 an Anglo-French Joint Naval Commission was created to protect French and British citizens, with no claim to jurisdiction over native affairs. It governed in 1887-1889 and again in 1890-1906. Between those spells, from 1889 to 1890, Franceville, an area around present-day Port Vila, declared itself an independent commune under its elected mayor and president, Ferdinand Chevillard.

  In 1906, France and the United Kingdom agreed to run the islands jointly as the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides. It had two separate governmental, legal, judicial and financial systems, joined only in a Joint Court. The duplicated administrations made governing slow and difficult, and the government was underfunded. Education, healthcare and other services were left to the missionaries.

  The Anglo-French Protocol of 1914 extended the Condominium's authority with missionary support, though it was not formally ratified until 1922. Land expropriation and labour abuses continued. Ni-Vanuatu were barred from acquiring the citizenship of either power, which left them officially stateless.

  During the 1920s and 1930s, indentured workers from Vietnam, then part of French Indochina, came to the plantations. By 1929 there were some 6,000 Vietnamese people in the New Hebrides. In the 1940s they grew restless over poor working conditions and over the effects of Allied troops, who were generally more sympathetic to them than the planters were. Most were repatriated in 1946 and 1963, and a small community remains today. Those troops had come to the islands for a very different reason.

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• 5. Wartime Visitors

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  In 1940, the fall of France to Nazi Germany allowed Britain to gain a greater level of authority in the islands. The Australian military stationed a 2,000-strong force on Malakula to guard Australia against a possible Japanese invasion.

  After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941, Japan advanced rapidly through Melanesia. By April 1942 it held much of what is now Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. That left the New Hebrides on the front line of any further advance. From May 1942, American troops were stationed on the islands, where they built airstrips, roads, military bases and supporting infrastructure on Efate and Espiritu Santo.

  At the peak of the deployment, some 50,000 Americans were stationed on the two bases, outnumbering a native population of roughly 40,000. A Ni-Vanuatu force of some 200 men, the New Hebrides Defence Force, supported the Americans. Thousands more worked on construction and maintenance in the Vanuatu Labor Corps.

  The Americans were friendlier and more informal than the colonial officials, and relatively wealthy. African American troops served with a degree of equality, although in a segregated force. The Americans effectively sidelined the Anglo-French authorities, and their behaviour badly undermined the colonial belief in European superiority.

  The setting of James Michener's novel Tales of the South Pacific was wartime Vanuatu.

  With the successful reoccupation of the Solomons in 1943, the New Hebrides lost their strategic importance. The Americans withdrew in 1945. They sold much of their equipment at bargain prices and dumped the rest in the sea, at a place now called Million Dollar Point on Espiritu Santo.

  The rapid arrival and departure of the Americans fed the growth of cargo cults, the best known being the John Frum movement. Followers hoped that by returning to traditional values while imitating aspects of the American presence, they would bring about a delivery of American goods, the cargo. Many cults died out. The John Frum cult on Tanna is still large, centred on the village of Lamakara, and it has adherents in parliament.

  The Condominium government came back after the war, understaffed and underfunded, and struggled to reassert its authority. That weakness set the stage for a postwar push to modernise.

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• 6. Independence And Upheaval

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  From the 1950s, the Condominium government launched a somewhat belated campaign of modernisation. Hospitals were built, doctors trained and immunisation campaigns carried out. The authorities took over the inadequate mission schools, and primary enrolment became near-universal by 1970. Tighter oversight of the plantations brought higher wages. Cattle ranching, commercial fishing and manganese mining were set up. An Advisory Council created in 1957 included some Ni-Vanuatu but held little power.

  The development had unintended effects. In the 1960s, planters fenced and cleared large areas of bushland for cattle, and Ni-Vanuatu often regarded this land as communally held kastom land. On Espiritu Santo, Chief Buluk and Jimmy Stevens founded the Nagriamel movement in 1966. It opposed further clearances and called for gradual, Ni-Vanuatu-led development. The authorities arrested both men in 1967, and on release they began pressing for complete independence.

  In 1971, Father Walter Lini established the New Hebrides Cultural Association, later renamed the New Hebrides National Party. It also sought independence and opposed land expropriation. In 1977 it became the Vanua'aku Pati. It was seen as the party of Anglophone Protestants, and Britain, which wished to leave the colony altogether, backed it.

  French settlers and Francophone Ni-Vanuatu formed rival parties, including the Mouvement Autonomiste des Nouvelles-Hébrides on Espiritu Santo and the Union des Communautés des Nouvelles-Hébrides on Efate. Together with Nagriamel they were known as the Moderates. They represented Catholic Francophone interests and wanted a slower path to independence, a federal system and French kept as an official language. France backed them to preserve its influence in the region, especially in New Caledonia, where it was trying to suppress an independence movement.

  In November 1975, the first election to a new Representative Assembly gave the National Party an overall victory. The Moderates disputed it, and Jimmy Stevens threatened to secede. The Resident Commissioners postponed the opening of the Assembly, and protests and counter-protests, some violent, followed. The Assembly finally convened in November 1976.

  In March 1977, a conference in London agreed on fresh elections and an independence referendum in 1980. The Vanua'aku Pati boycotted both the conference and the election. It set up a parallel People's Provisional Government that held de facto control of many areas. A compromise eventually produced a Government of National Unity under a new constitution. In November 1979 the party won a comfortable majority, and independence was scheduled for the 30th of July 1980.

  Tension continued through 1980. In January, Nagriamel and Moderate activists under Stevens, funded by the American libertarian Phoenix Foundation, took over the island government on Espiritu Santo. They declared an independent Republic of Vemarana. In May, a Moderate rebellion on Tanna collapsed after one of its leaders was shot dead. British and French troops arrived in July, but the French, still ambivalent about independence, effectively neutered the force. Law and order collapsed on Espiritu Santo, and large-scale looting followed.

  Independence arrived on schedule on the 30th of July 1980, with Walter Lini as prime minister. The new name Vanuatu combines vanua, meaning land or home, with tu, meaning to stand. Together the words convey independent status. The Anglo-French forces left in August, and Lini called in troops from Papua New Guinea. They quickly ended the brief Coconut War, and Stevens surrendered on the 1st of September. He was later jailed.

  Lini ran an Anglophone-dominated government until 1991. He joined the Non-Aligned Movement, opposed apartheid in South Africa and every form of colonialism, and built links with Libya and Cuba. He also opposed the French presence in New Caledonia and French nuclear testing in French Polynesia. In 1987, after he suffered a stroke on a visit to the United States, Barak Sopé broke away to found the Melanesian Progressive Party. President Ati George Sokomanu tried to unseat Lini and failed. Lini grew distrustful and fired anyone he thought disloyal.

  One of them, Donald Kalpokas, declared himself leader of the Vanua'aku Pati and split it in two. On the 6th of September 1991, a no confidence vote removed Lini, and Kalpokas became prime minister. A crash in the price of copra, the main export, and Lini's flirtation with Communist states had already weakened the economy.

  Since the 1991 election, politics has been unstable. Fractious coalitions and frequent no confidence votes have swapped prime ministers again and again. In 2010-2011 Sato Kilman and Edward Natapei traded the post through votes later invalidated on technical points and reversed by the Chief Justice. In 2013 Moana Carcasses Kalosil, of mixed French-Tahitian ancestry and a naturalised citizen, became the first prime minister who was not Ni-Vanuatu.

  A corruption investigation in 2015 convicted numerous MPs for bribery, Kalosil among them. Kilman lost the 2016 election to Charlot Salwai, and Salwai lost in 2020 amid allegations of perjury, bringing in Bob Loughman. Through it all the democratic system has held. Vanuatu recorded its first case of COVID-19 only in November 2020, making it one of the last places on Earth to do so.

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• 7. Many Tongues Many Customs

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  Vanuatu has 113 indigenous languages, and the density of languages per capita is the highest of any nation. The average is only 2,000 speakers per language. Several factors lie behind this. They include continuing waves of migration, numerous decentralised and self-sufficient communities, and hostilities in which no group could dominate the others. The difficult geography also impeded travel and communication within and between islands.

  All are Southern Oceanic languages except for three outlier Polynesian ones, and all belong to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. Bislama, a creole, is the national language, and Bislama, English and French are official. It combines a typical Melanesian grammar and phonology with an almost entirely English-derived vocabulary. Most people use it as a second language, but it is a first language in towns. Between 1999 and 2009, the share of the population using indigenous languages receded from 73.1% to 63.2%.

  About one-third of the population belongs to the Presbyterian Church in Vanuatu. Roman Catholics and Anglicans each claim about 15%. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has 3.6% of the population, with over 11,000 members. As of 2010, 1.4% of people were Baháʼí, which made Vanuatu the sixth most Baháʼí country in the world.

  In the north, wealth is established by how much a person can give away through a grade-taking system. Chiefs there are graded through the nimangki system. Pigs, especially those with rounded tusks, are a symbol of wealth throughout Vanuatu. The centre follows more traditional Melanesian systems, while in the south a system of granting titles with privileges has developed.

  Most villages have a nakamal, a clubhouse where men meet and drink kava. Chiefs remain the leading figures at village level, and it has been reported that even politicians need to oblige them. The national Council of Chiefs, the Malvatu Mauri, advises the government on culture and language. The constitution also provides for village and island courts presided over by chiefs to deal with customary law.

  Traditional music survives in rural areas, with instruments mostly idiophones such as drums, slit gongs, stamping tubes and rattles. String band music, combining guitars, ukuleles and popular songs, became widespread across the country during the 20th century. Zouk and reggaeton are popular among modern commercial genres.

  Laplap is the national dish. Most food is cooked with hot stones or by boiling and steaming, and very little is fried. Coconut milk and cream flavour many dishes, and food shortages are rare.

  In 2006 and again in 2024, the Happy Planet Index placed Vanuatu first in the world. The index weighs reported happiness, life expectancy and ecological footprint.

  On the island of Pentecost, men practise a ritual called gol, or land diving. They leap from a wooden tower 98 feet high with their ankles tied to vines. The dive is part of the annual yam harvest festival.

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• 8. Fire Storm And Livelihood

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  Vanuatu is a Y-shaped chain of about 83 relatively small volcanic islands, 65 of them inhabited, spread over about 1300 km from north to south. Its total area is roughly 12274 km2. Espiritu Santo is the largest island and also holds the highest point, Mount Tabwemasana, at 1879 m. The capital Port Vila lies on Efate, and Luganville is on Espiritu Santo. France also claims two of the islands, Matthew and Hunter, as part of New Caledonia.

  The shoreline is mostly rocky with fringing reefs and no continental shelf, so it drops swiftly into the ocean depths. Active volcanoes include Lopevi, Mount Yasur and several underwater ones. A 6.4 magnitude undersea eruption in November 2008 caused no casualties.

  About nine months of the year bring warm to hot rainy weather. The wettest and hottest months run from December through April, which is also the cyclone season. Rainfall averages about 2360 mm per year and can reach 4000 mm in the northern islands. The WorldRiskIndex 2021 ranked Vanuatu first in the world for disaster risk.

  In March 2015, Cyclone Pam struck as a Category 5 storm. The United Nations first put the death toll at 11, six on Efate and five on Tanna, and later accounts say 16 people died. Lands minister Ralph Regenvanu said, "This is the worst disaster to affect Vanuatu ever as far as we know." Cyclone Harold hit Luganville in April 2020.

  Earthquakes are frequent too. Between 1909 and 2001 there were 58 quakes of magnitude 7 or greater. A quake and tsunami in November 1999 left thousands homeless on Pentecost. In December 2024, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake reportedly damaged almost every house on Efate and killed 19 people. The United Nations estimated that 116,000 people, a third of the population, were directly affected.

  On land, Vanuatu has relatively few plant and animal species. Its indigenous flying fox, Pteropus anetianus, pollinates native trees and spreads their seeds. Three or possibly four adult saltwater crocodiles live in its mangroves, with no breeding population. About 90% of households fish, which has depleted fish near villages, and logging and slash-and-burn farming have increased erosion. Even so, the country scored 8.82 out of 10 on the 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index, 18th of 172 countries. It banned plastic bags and straws in 2018, and in November 2025 it passed the Vanuatu Oceans Act to protect its marine resources through community-based management.

  Agriculture provides a living for 65% of the population. Exports include copra, kava, beef, cocoa and timber. Many farmers have abandoned food crops and use kava earnings to buy food. In 2007, kava was worth 341 million vatu and copra 195 million. Cattle came from Australia, introduced by the British planter James Paddon.

  The wreck of the SS President Coolidge, a US ocean liner turned troop carrier, lies off Espiritu Santo. Sunk during the Second World War, it is one of the largest shipwrecks accessible for recreational diving. Tourist arrivals reached 196,134 in 2008, against only 57,000 in 2000.

  Vanuatu levies no income tax, withholding tax, capital gains tax or inheritance tax. Until 2008 it did not share account information with other governments. Many shipping companies fly its flag, and file-sharing providers such as the makers of KaZaA and WinMX incorporated there. The country also sells citizenship for about $150,000, and passport sales may account for over 30% of revenue. Britain ended Vanuatu's visa-free access on the 19th of July 2023 over concerns about the scheme.

  In 2018, Australian newspaper reports said over 50% of Vanuatu's $440 million debt was owed to China. China had funded a $114 million redevelopment of Luganville Wharf, with room to dock naval vessels. In July 2024, China completed a new presidential palace costing $21 million. At the opening, Hu Chunhua presented an oversized golden key marked "China Aid", while dragon dancers performed and guests shared ceremonial kava.

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