Malekula History

History

Southern islanders say that their cultural hero, Ambat, had two children with white skin and long, straight hair. Like Adam and Eve, these children each ate a rose apple despite their father’s order not to do so. For their crime they were turned black. They were also required to wear nambas and to remain isolated in the island’s south.

The people of the North believed in Tagaro, creator of everything – also known as Tangaroa, God of the Sea in Polynesia.

When Europe started screaming for cotton during the American Civil War, settlers in Malekula cleared much of the eastern coastal plain for cotton and coconut plantations, but malaria, cyclones and cannibalism drove the early settlers away.

During the 1880s, the French Compagnie Calédonienne des Nouvelles-Hébrides (CCNH) bought up large tracts of the eastern coast and today, now named PRV (Plantations Réunies de Vanuatu), it remains the largest plantation in the country. Because of constant friction between English and French planters over land ownership, French troops landed in Port Sandwich in 1886 but left two years later, the trouble by no means resolved.

Vanuatu’s last kaekae man (victim of cannibalism), went into a Big Nambas ground oven in 1969. The Condominium government of New Hebrides respected the traditional rights of the natives, circumstances that allowed human flesh to be eaten quite close to police stations at Norsup and Lakatoro.

A more common form of cannibalism continued for some years: the ritual eating of flesh from a deceased relative, to keep something of the beloved among the living.