History of Vanuatu

Archaeological evidence indicates that, by 1300 bce, islands in northern Vanuatu had been settled by people of the Lapita culture from Melanesian islands to the west. Since then, there have been successive waves of migrants, including people of Polynesian origin on the southern islands of Aniwa and Futuna (not to be confused with Futuna Island in the French overseas collectivity of Wallis and Futuna). About 1200 a highly stratified society developed in central Vanuatu with the arrival (from the south, according to tradition) of the great chief Roy Mata (or Roymata). His death was marked by an elaborate ritual that included the burying alive of one man and one woman from each of the clans under his influence.

European contact began with the Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernández de Quirós (1606), followed by the French navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1768) and the British captain James Cook (1774). Cook mapped the island group and named it the New Hebrides. European missionaries and sandalwood traders settled on the fringes of islands from the 1840s, but their impact on the indigenous people was minimal. Significant cultural change occurred only after the 1860s as thousands of ni-Vanuatu men and women who had been indentured to work on plantations in Fiji and New Caledonia and in Queensland, Australia, began to return to their homes. Many established new forms of political influence within the network of Protestant (mainly Presbyterian) missions or successfully competed against European traders and planters in the group. To protect the interests of the mainly British missionaries and mainly French planters, the British and French governments established rudimentary political control with a Joint Naval Commission in 1887.

This arrangement was succeeded in 1906 by an Anglo-French condominium, under which resident commissioners in the capital, Port-Vila, retained responsibility over their own nationals and jointly ruled the indigenous people. This administrative arrangement had only a slight impact, however, on most ni-Vanuatu, whose chief European contact continued to be with either missionaries or planters. The islands became a major Allied base during World War II, when the spectacle of free-spending African American troops inspired the transformation of the Jon (or John) Frum cargo cult on Tanna into an important anti-European political movement. After the war, local political initiatives originated in concern over land ownership. At that time more than one-third of the New Hebrides continued to be owned by foreigners.

Independence was agreed upon at a 1977 conference in Paris attended by British, French, and New Hebridean representatives. Elections were held, and a constitution was drawn up in 1979. Despite an unsuccessful attempt in mid-1980 by Jimmy Stevens, the Na-Griamel Party leader, to establish the independence of the island of Espiritu Santo from the rest of the group, the New Hebrides became independent within the Commonwealth under the name of the Republic of Vanuatu on July 30, 1980; the next month it entered into a defense pact with Papua New Guinea to replace the British and French forces that formerly had defended the islands. In 1982 Vanuatu claimed the uninhabited islands of Matthew and Hunter, about 155 miles (250 km) southeast of Anatom and part of the same archipelago as Vanuatu, in order to expand its exclusive economic zone. France disputed the claim, and the issue continued into the early 21st century without resolution.

The Vanua’aku Pati (VP, “Our Land Party”), headed by Father Walter Lini, formed the first parliamentary majority, with Lini as prime minister. The VP retained slim majorities under Lini’s leadership throughout the 1980s. Lini’s government pursued a nonaligned foreign policy, establishing diplomatic and economic ties with the major capitalist countries as well as with the Soviet Union, China, Libya, and Cuba. In mid-1991, after no-confidence votes from both the VP’s congress and Parliament, Lini was succeeded as party leader and as prime minister by Donald Kalpokas. For the December 1991 general election, Lini and his supporters formed the National United Party (NUP), which won enough seats to form a coalition government with the former opposition, the Union of Moderate Parties (UMP), under the francophone prime minister Maxime Carlot Korman.

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Carlot Korman retained the post through a series of coalition governments until the 1995 general election, which initiated six years of unstable parliamentary coalitions with six changes of prime minister, including additional terms for former premiers Carlot Korman and Kalpokas and two brief terms for Rialuth Serge Vohor of the UMP. Several of the administrations (notably Carlot Korman’s and that headed by Barak Sope of the Melanesian Progressive Party in 1999–2001) came apart amid charges of official corruption and criminal activity. Despite the ongoing political turmoil, the government in 1997 adopted a comprehensive reform program funded by the Asian Development Bank, the main objectives of which were to reform the civil service and other public-sector institutions, improve infrastructure, and attract increased foreign investment. Although the frequent changes of government in the late 20th and early 21st centuries indicated a sometimes fragile stability, overall Vanuatu was considered one of the more peaceful and successful countries of the region.

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In March 2015, however, Vanuatu suffered a severe setback to its development when Cyclone Pam, a category 5 (highest intensity) tropical cyclone, struck the islands. It wreaked devastation across the archipelago, including the island of Éfaté and Port-Vila on it, which had just completed rebuilding from a 2002 earthquake that had greatly damaged the town’s infrastructure. The storm, which reached wind speeds of up to 185 miles (300 km) per hour, flattened buildings throughout the islands, destroyed crops, caused loss of life, and left thousands of people homeless.