The People and Culture of Vanuatu: Languages, Kastom and Daily Life

The people

About 320,000 people live in Vanuatu. The large majority are ni-Vanuatu, a Melanesian population descended from settlers who reached the archipelago roughly three thousand years ago as part of the Lapita expansion across the Pacific. Around a quarter of the population lives in the two towns, Port Vila and Luganville; the rest live in villages.

Languages

Vanuatu has around 113 living indigenous languages. Measured against its population that is the highest density of languages anywhere on earth. Malakula alone carries roughly thirty, and communities separated by a ridge may share none.

The shared language is Bislama, which grew out of the nineteenth-century labour trade and is now one of three official languages alongside English and French. The English/French split is a direct inheritance of the joint Anglo-French administration that ran the islands until 1980.

Kastom

Daily life in most of the country runs on kastom — customary law and knowledge covering land, rank, marriage and ceremony. Kastom is named in the constitution as a source of law, and all land in Vanuatu belongs to customary owners.

How a village works

Most people live by subsistence gardening — yam, taro, manioc, banana — with fishing, and with cash coming from copra, kava or work in town. Standing is earned in much of the country, through ceremonies involving pigs, and the boar's tusk on the national flag comes from that system.

Beliefs

Most ni-Vanuatu are Christian, largely Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic, following the mission period. Christianity is generally held alongside kastom rather than in place of it.

How people make a living

The majority of households are subsistence gardeners growing yam, taro, manioc, banana and island cabbage, with fishing on the coast. Cash comes from copra, cocoa, kava, beef on Santo, and wages in town. Seasonal work schemes in Australia and New Zealand are now a significant source of household income and, like the labour trade before them, they change village life while sustaining it.

School

Primary schooling is widespread; secondary schooling generally means leaving the island. The English and French systems still run in parallel, an inheritance of the Condominium, and which one a child enters is usually decided by which mission reached the area a century ago.

Town and village

Around a quarter of the population lives in Port Vila and Luganville, and the share is rising. Urban households generally retain land rights and family obligations in their home island, so the movement is not a clean break. Remittance flows both ways depending on who is having the harder year.

Naming and identity

A ni-Vanuatu person’s island of origin is a primary identifier, more so than nationality in most daily contexts. Asking where someone is from expects the island as an answer.

Music

String band music — guitar, ukulele, a bush bass made from a tea chest — is the popular form, played at every gathering and broadcast constantly. Alongside it sit customary forms tied to ceremony: slit-drum rhythms, panpipes in the north, and the water music of Torba. Fest’Napuan is where the two meet.

Food

The staples are root crops and banana, cooked in an earth oven or boiled in coconut milk. Laplap — grated root crop baked in leaves with coconut cream, often with meat or fish — is the national dish and varies by island. Fresh fish, island cabbage and, in season, mango and pawpaw fill out the rest.

Sport

Football and volleyball are played everywhere; cricket has a following; and Vanuatu has had international success in beach volleyball out of proportion to its size. Sport is one of the few national institutions that crosses the English and French school divide cleanly.