Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolonial Microcosm: Identity and Development in Vanuatu

2. Nationalism, Kastom, and Other Boundaries of Identity

chapter 2 Nationalism, Kastom, and Other Boundaries of Identity [S]tates have used their force to create cultural diversity, and [also] to create cultural uniformity. This has made the state the most powerful cultural force in the modern world and the most schizophrenic. —Immanuel Wallerstein, “The National and the Universal” Here is one important thing to remember. You are a ni-Vanuatu, a citizen of Vanuatu. Try not to think of yourself as someone who comes from Santo or Tanna, Epi or Aniwa or one of the other islands. Instead think of yourself as a ni-Vanuatu and use [Bislama], your national language. —The Story of Our Islands, Part II. The People and Government. An Environmental Studies Handbook for the Teachers and Children in Senior Primary Schools in Vanuatu Painted with the broadest strokes, the evolution of nationalism in the New Hebrides mirrors that of struggles for independence elsewhere in the Third World. A cluster of peoples that a century before may have had only the remotest glimmer of solidarity—indeed, who may frequently have been at war with each other—now found themselves united in opposition to some colonial power. This sense of unity was both natural and contrived: It was natural in that colonial political structures, and often a colonial language, institutionalized economic exchange, regular communications, and general interactions among discrete sets of colonial subjects; but it was contrived in that colonized elites, invariably educated and therefore Westernized, had to channel such emerging commonalities into a voluntaristic sense of national identity. From there the goal was statehood. The model of nationalism, and indeed its legitimiz59 ing force, was the European nation-state itself. Imparting this political ideal to the less acculturated masses constituted a major challenge. In multiethnic colonies, this nationalizing challenge has continued since independence.1 This, on one level, was the experience of the New Hebrides, where hyperinsularity and local warfare negated precontact national unity. Prior to and even during most of the colonial era, island populations had minimal mutual contact. In the south, Aneityum and Aniwa islanders had little truck with each other, much less reason to canoe to the northern islands of Gaua in the Banks or Hiu in the Torres. Even when coastal inhabitants of adjacent islands did interact with each other, as those of southern Pentecost and northern Ambrym, they usually had no communication with groups on the other side or in the interior of their own islands. And what contact they did have was not especially peaceful: On Malakula and Santo, localized intra-island warfare, which often resulted in the eating of the enemy, was particularly renowned.2 It is therefore not surprising that neighboring communities rarely agreed on a name for the island they shared, much less on a transpelagic cosmology. In the absence of any overarching myth of common descent and glorious history , which Walker Connor asserts is necessary for nationhood,3 some Viewing Independence Day celebrations. 60 chapter 2 transcendent common culture has had to be created, constructed, or, as Benedict Anderson would put it, “imagined.”4 Even though the condocolonial administration increased geographical awareness of the outer islands (particularly in Efate and Santo, whence northern and southern islands were administered), in the late 1960s and 1970s nationalist leaders still needed to overcome geographical dispersion, religious rivalry, and parochial identities to create a sense of New Hebridean nationalism. Along with Bislama, kastom—a common denominator of indigenous customs, rituals, and practices with which all islanders could broadly identify—was chosen as the means to achieving this unity. Because the church infrastructure often overshadowed the colonial one, political and religious leadership, particularly from within the Anglican and Presbyterian hierarchies, overlapped. What distinguished the Vanuatu nationalist struggle was the nature of the Condominium. On account of the dualistic nature of New Hebridean colonialism and the bifurcated loyalties that intracolonial rivalry engendered, the nationalist struggle became uniquely divisive. Unlike in Algeria or Ireland, it did not pit loyalists to the colonial regime against revolutionaries for independence, but rather split indigenous communities according to religious, linguistic, and condocolonial af¤nities . Nationalism in Vanuatu still entails overcoming those divisions which brewed during the condominial era and boiled over in the preindependence period. History has shown that nationalism is easiest to achieve where colonial domination has been strongest. Independence insurgencies—in Algeria, India, and Vietnam, for example—nationalized5 populations in ways that did not occur in Mali, Nepal, or Kuwait. Island colonies...