Kastom Vanuatu

Man and woman in kastom dress

Chief Virhembat and one of his wives at Amokh, Malekula four months before his death on 3 April, 1988, age 60. Virhembat was the last of the Big Nambas to live the kastom lifestyle, but was successfully baptized by the local European priest shortly before death. His wives and family immediately joined the rest of the clan on the coast near the mission. Photo ©S. Combs 1987.

"Kastom" is a Bislama word derived from the English word "custom", but its meaning encompasses all things customary, traditional, and related to magic and sorcery.

Vanuatu kastom is not something I know a lot about; much of it is secret and passed down from the initiated to the deserving over generations. Quite a bit has been lost due to the efforts of Western missionaries and other post-contact cultural chaos, including extermination by Western diseases, general demoralization, and ni-Vanuatu attempts to emulate kastom blong waetman. The latter involves imitating Westerners in an attempt to gain a fair (i.e., equal) share of our material wealth. These efforts include the well-known cargo cults but also, by my observation, the foreign aid system, Christianity, Westminister-style government, education, and other trappings of the West.

In general, when I lived on Malekula Island I accorded kastom the respect which I felt it deserved and made little effort to break tabu by nosing into another culture's business. After I kept my mouth shut and didn't passing judgement on what I was told, eventually my co-workers and others did share a little and give me a small peek into their kastom world. Sometimes, they would test me and ask me questions such as did I really believed that men changed themselves into sharks. My reply was always along the lines of how I was a whiteman and my reality was different than theirs. People accepted this pretty well; they all thought we were all incomprehensible, anyway.

With the explosion of the World Wide Web, several sites referring to Vanuatu kastom have appeared. Here are links to some of them. As time allows, I'll also post kastom stories that I wrote home about.

The report I wrote as I left Malekula in 1989 contains my amateur observations of ni-Vanuatu anthropology, including psychology, sociology, world view, attitude towards land, economy, religion, politics, and the final word on the effects of Westerner aid workers on Ni-Vanuatu.
A story of "The Day the Ground Got Angry" across the island from where we lived.
From California's Humbolt State University, Professor Ron Johnson's collection of photos of kastom objects and ceremonies.
From the University of California at Riverside's California Museum of Photography, a circa 1920 photo labelled "Atchin Idols" with notes. I visited Atchin Island (off the NE coast of Malekula (map)) in 1988, and the stone platform is still there. What the photographer identified as "idols" are actually slit drums carved from tree trunks. They are struck with wood near the slit to provide the beat for dances and ceremonies. I was told that the platform is now used for the initiation circumcision of boys. My informant emphasized that the procedure was "had tumas" (very difficult, or painful) because the foreskin is merely nicked with a piece of sharp bamboo before being ripped off. I have no doubt that it smarts.
Just north of Atchin Island (map) is Vao Island, where visitors are free to wander among several nasara, or traditional family dancing grounds. Note that the design of NE Malekula slit drums has not changed since the '20s (see the "Atchin Idols" photo). A ni-Vanuatu's nasara is the link between him and his kastom graon (family traditional land base) and as such holds immense psychological, spiritual, and cultural importance. When new roads are built, great care is taken to ensure that they do not intrude upon any nasaras; there is no argument about re-routing around them. I was told that a man who changed himself into a shark and killed a small boy at Vao in 1987 did so because the boy's uncle had taken some stones from the attacker's nasara to build a bread oven. When I pointed out that this man's house was next to the church and asked if there was any inconsistency between his Christianity and the shark transformation, I was told that "his kastom spirit is stronger than the Church's spirit".
In 1992, my wife went to one of the land dives, or naghol, on South Pentecost Island. This kastom ceremony is performed each April and May to ensure a good yam harvest; men tie vines to their ankles and dive from tall towers á la bungee jumpers. Some say that the original jumper was a woman who tricked her abusive husband into jumping after her sans vines, but the only modern-day death I have heard of occurred when an out-of-season jump was performed for Queen Elizabeth II in 1972.
An interview with Michael Krieger, the author of "Conversations with the Cannibals: The End of the Old South Pacific". Although this interview focuses on the one chapter about cannibalism, I found this book to be the best I have read about a modern voyage through the Pacific.
On cannibalism, my wife's co-workers in the Norsup Hospital Laboratory (ples blong blad or "the blood place") told her that in their tradition, the best bits of a person to eat were the insides of the upper arms and thighs. I gained the impression from talking with people that the missionaries had instilled a lot of guilt about cannibalism. I also heard that the government had been forced to put a high fence around the Port Vila cemetery in 1987 because someone was digging up fresh bodies and sucking the marrow out of a certain bone to gain magical powers.
A photo essay on kava, Vanuatu's favourite recreational drug.
I recommend the book "Savage Civilization" by Tom Harrisson (biography omitting his war service as a Coast Watcher with the indigenous people of Borneo) for an account of his life with the Big Nambas tribe of Malekula in the mid-1930's plus traditional and modern histories of Vanuatu. Harrisson had a clear-eyed view of Vanuatu, unencumbered by Westerner guilt or local propaganda and based on personal knowledge of the Vanuatu outside expatriate enclaves. This book is out of print, but can be found at booksellers who specialize in second-hand books about the Pacific.
"Agriculture In Vanuatu, A Historical Review" by Barry Weightman includes an excellent and extensive survey of the crops and livestock that sustained ni-Vanuatu before contact. This book can be purchased from the British Friends of Vanuatu, 67 Beresford Road, Cheam, Surrey, United Kingdom SM2 6ER.
The Jon Frum Home Page (mirror site) explores cargo cults in general and the Jon Frum cult on Tanna Island in particular.
Cargo cults are anti-Westerner movements based on the concept that material goods are made in the heavens and sent to earth to be equally shared among all people. Westerners, however, work magic that selfishly diverts the cargo to themselves.
The colonial powers used the classic tactic of requiring the natives to pay annual cash head taxes so they would be forced to enter the money economy by working for colonial employers. Ni-Vanuatu soon recognized that Westerners were controlling their real wages by setting pay rates as well as the prices of goods in the stores. Not caring much about Western notions about the relative value of management vs. labour, they felt it was grossly unfair that they sweated long hours and still received a small fraction of the store-bought goods that their bosses got for simply telling them what to do.
So, when Jon Frum appeared to certain Tannese in the late Thirties he found a ready audience for his message. If the ni-Vanuatu threw all their money into the sea and quit wage-work for Westerners, he would return with plenty of cargo for all. The British and French colonial administrations recognized this as a direct threat to Western economic dominance of Tanna, the rest of Vanuatu and their other Pacific colonies. A more charitable interpretation might be that they felt it would inhibit the "development" of Tanna. In any case, they jailed the Jon Frum leaders for many years during the '40s and 50's.
In the meantime, World War II occurred and suddenly out of nowhere ships and planes arrived disgorging hundreds of thousands of men with millions of tons of food, trucks, radios, buildings, and you name it. The Jon Frum cult gained impetus and adopted the US military medic symbol of a red cross in a white circle. Westerners started assuming Jon Frum must have an unknown American Marine Medic, despite his first appearance having pre-dated the War. (The Bislama pronunciation is "Joan Froom", but English speakers often pronounce it "John From" and assume he is "John from American".)
The original leaders of the Jon Frum cult were eventually released, and they continued to report the occasional visitation from Jon Frum until their deaths over the past couple of decades. The cult members continue to hold regular services and dances and march in uniforms under the American flag, waiting to Jon Frum to return with the cargo they deserve.
Rambaramps of South Malekula, about kastom funerary figures made by Small Nambas language groups on south Malekula Island.
A collection of Small Nambas masks at the Alcheringa Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia.

My boss thanking Small Nambas men for their gift of a nambugi. The villagers are wearing their nambas under their shorts. Photo ©S. Combs 1987.
A smaller Small Nambas funerary figure is the "nambugi". I recorded a trip to a traditional Small Nambas village in the mountains of South Malekula in a letter home, including details of what cultural practices I knew of.
We attended a kastom wedding on Ambae Island at which we witnessed the single weirdest thing we saw in Vanuatu.
Once a year the palolo worms come out from the reef, and we were there to capture our share.
The Summer Institute of Languages, which translates the Bible into many languages, lists 107 kastom languages, as well as Vanuatu's Official Languages of English and French and the National Language of Bislama. This is an illustration of the fragmentation of Vanuatu society; for thousands of years adjacent villages refused to share common languages. Nationhood, made necessary by the intrusion of the rest of the world, is a challenge.
The Vanuatu Cultural Centre site posted some very interesting photos and ni-Vanuatu oral history of 19th Century Labour Recruiting for the Queensland sugarcane plantations (repeated in Bislama), a photo essay on Traditional Canoe Construction, plus much information and an exhaustive bibliography on Vanuatu's many languages.

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