Vanuatu's history: ruled by two powers and claimed by neither

Who settled the islands before Europeans came

The first people to reach the archipelago belonged to the Lapita culture, seafarers whose pottery is stamped with fine dentate patterns. Britannica dates their settlement of the northern islands to 1300 BCE at the latest; the account in Wikipedia's country article places the first settlement roughly between 1100 and 700 BCE, about 3,000 years ago. Lapita sites have since been found on most of the islands, from the Banks group in the north to Aneityum in the south.

The best known is Teouma, on Efate near Port Vila. A bulldozer driver clearing ground for a shrimp farm turned up pottery there in 2003, and researchers from the Australian National University and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre excavated the site between 2004 and 2010. According to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, they found sixty-eight graves holding the remains of about a hundred people, every adult buried without the head, and more than a hundred ceramic pots and plates. One skull lay inside a decorated pot.

Ancient DNA from Teouma showed that these first settlers had East Asian ancestry, from Taiwan or the northern Philippines, and little or none of the Papuan ancestry that most ni-Vanuatu carry today. They hunted to extinction animals found nowhere else, among them a land crocodile, the tortoise Meiolania damelipi and several flightless birds. From about 2,500 years ago people from the Bismarck Archipelago and elsewhere in Near Oceania arrived and gradually replaced most of the earlier ancestry. The languages did not change with them: every one of the more than 100 indigenous languages of Vanuatu belongs to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family.

Oral tradition on Efate and the small islands of Lelepa and Eretoka keeps the memory of a chief called Roi Mata, possibly a title held by several men, who united rival clans and kept a long peace. Britannica dates his arrival to about 1200 and records that his funeral included the burial alive of one man and one woman from each clan under his authority. Wikipedia's history article puts the death of the last chief of that title in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, in a mound now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

How sandalwood and labour recruiters changed the islands

Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, a Portuguese navigator sailing for Spain, reached the island he named La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo in 1606, believing he had found the southern continent. His settlement at Big Bay, Nueva Jerusalén, was abandoned after a month. Louis Antoine de Bougainville passed in 1768 and called the group the Great Cyclades; of his names only Pentecost survived. James Cook charted the islands from July to September 1774 and named them the New Hebrides, after the Scottish islands. On 5 August 1774 he saw the eruption of Yasur on Tanna, the first written record of its activity in English.

Sustained contact came with trade. Peter Dillon found sandalwood on Erromango in 1825, the timber fetching tea in China, and the rush he started ended in 1830 after a clash between Polynesian workers and Erromangans. Further stands on Efate, Espiritu Santo and Aneityum kept the trade going until supplies ran out in the mid-1860s. Missionaries arrived from 1839, when John Williams and James Harris of the London Missionary Society were killed on Erromango. The Presbyterian John Geddie settled on Aneityum in 1848 and stayed for the rest of his life.

From the 1860s planters in Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa recruited labour in the islands, often by deception or force, in the trade known as blackbirding. At its height more than half the adult men of several islands were working abroad. Overwork, abuse and introduced disease cut the population steeply. Australia stopped the recruitment in 1906, Fiji in 1910 and Samoa in 1913. Britannica dates the deepest cultural change to the return of these workers, thousands of whom came home after the 1860s and built new kinds of influence inside the Presbyterian missions or competed with European traders. The plantation pidgin they brought back became Bislama.

Why settlers wanted the islands annexed

Settlers looked for land to grow cotton, starting with Henry Ross Lewin on Tanna in 1865, and turned to coffee, cocoa and above all coconuts when cotton prices fell. British subjects from Australia came first. The Compagnie Calédonienne des Nouvelles-Hébrides, founded in 1882 by John Higginson and taken over by the French government in 1894, tipped the balance, and by 1906 there were 401 French settlers against 228 British.

Britain and France declared the islands neutral territory in 1878 and created a Joint Naval Commission by the Convention of 16 October 1887 to protect their own nationals, with no jurisdiction over islanders. Settlers around present-day Port Vila declared the commune of Franceville on 9 August 1889 under Ferdinand Chevillard. All residents could vote, but only the fewer than fifty white residents among some five hundred people could hold office, and by June 1890 the commune had broken up.

Why Britain and France ruled together

Neither power would let the other annex the group, so in 1906 they agreed to govern it jointly as the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides. A Protocol of 1914, ratified only in 1922, widened its powers. Each power kept a resident commissioner in Port Vila with an administration of its own, and every official on one side had a counterpart on the other. Islanders could choose to be tried under English common law or French civil law, and a Native Court handled customary cases.

The Joint Court had three judges: one British, one French and a president nominated by the King of Spain, a post abolished in 1939. The joint administration ran the post office, the public radio, public works and the census. Ni-Vanuatu could take the citizenship of neither power, and to travel abroad they needed a document signed by both resident commissioners. Education and health care were left largely to the missions. Wikipedia's article on the New Hebrides records that cynics called the arrangement "the Pandemonium".

French planters brought in contract workers from Tonkin from 1921. Their number rose from 437 in 1923 to 5,413 in 1930 and fell to 1,630 in 1937, after the Depression ended French hopes of dominating the copra trade. Most Vietnamese were repatriated in 1946 and 1963.

What the Pacific War brought to the New Hebrides

The fall of France in 1940 gave Britain the upper hand in the condominium, and Australia stationed a force of 2,000 men on Malakula. After Japan took much of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, United States forces arrived from May 1942 and built airstrips, roads and bases on Efate and Espiritu Santo. At the peak of the deployment some 50,000 Americans were stationed on the two bases, against a native population of roughly 40,000. About 10,000 ni-Vanuatu men served in the Vanuatu Labor Corps, supplying the Guadalcanal campaign, and about 200 formed the New Hebrides Defence Force.

The Americans were wealthy by local standards and treated islanders with an informality colonial officials had not shown. Britannica writes that the spectacle of free-spending African American troops turned the John Frum cargo cult on Tanna into an anti-European political movement. When the Americans withdrew in 1945 they dumped surplus equipment in the sea off Espiritu Santo, at a place now called Million Dollar Point.

How land became the question of independence

After the war, Britannica writes, more than a third of the New Hebrides was still owned by foreigners, and Wikipedia's history article gives about 30% of the land area. In the 1960s planters began clearing more bush for cattle, often on land that ni-Vanuatu held to be custom land. On Espiritu Santo the Nagriamel movement, founded in 1966 by Chief Buluk and Jimmy Stevens, opposed further clearances; both men were arrested in 1967 and began pressing for independence on their release. In 1971 the Anglican priest Walter Lini founded the New Hebrides Cultural Association, which became the New Hebrides National Party and later the Vanua'aku Pati.

Politics divided along the line the condominium had drawn. The National Party was the party of English-speaking Protestants and had the backing of Britain, which wanted to leave. French-speaking and Catholic groups, known together as the Moderates, wanted a slower transition and a federal system, and France backed them, wary of the effect of independence on New Caledonia. A Representative Assembly was agreed in November 1974 and first elected in November 1975, but disputed results kept it from sitting until November 1976.

A conference of the two powers and New Hebridean representatives in 1977 agreed on elections and independence. Britannica places that conference in Paris and Wikipedia's country article in London in March 1977. The Vanua'aku Pati boycotted the next election and set up a People's Provisional Government that held de facto control of many areas. The territory became internally self-governing in January 1978, a constitution was drawn up in 1979, and in elections that November the Vanua'aku Pati won a clear majority. In February 1980 the Representative Assembly voted 26 to 2 for the name Vanuatu, from vanua, land or home, and tu, to stand.

What happened on Santo in the Coconut War

Independence was set for 30 July 1980, and the months before it were violent. On Espiritu Santo, Stevens and Nagriamel, backed by French-speaking landowners and by the Phoenix Foundation, an American group that wanted a libertarian tax haven, declared the island independent as the State of Vemerana. They blockaded the airport and destroyed two bridges. On Tanna a Moderate rising in May ended with one of its leaders shot dead.

On 8 June 1980 the New Hebrides government asked Britain and France for troops. About 200 Royal Marines of 42 Commando were sent from Plymouth, but France would not allow the force to act against the rebels. The New Hebrides became the Republic of Vanuatu on 30 July 1980, within the Commonwealth, and the following month it entered a defence pact with Papua New Guinea to replace the British and French forces. The Prime Minister, Walter Lini, then called in soldiers from Papua New Guinea, the first deployment of its defence force overseas, and the foreign press named the episode the Coconut War.

The fighting was brief. The rebels were armed largely with bows and arrows, slings and rocks, and casualties were few. In late August a vehicle carrying Stevens's son ran a Papua New Guinean roadblock and soldiers opened fire, killing him, and Stevens surrendered soon after. Wikipedia's article on the war dates the surrender to 28 August 1980 and its country article to 1 September. His trial revealed the Phoenix Foundation's money and secret support from the French government. He was sentenced to fourteen years and stayed in prison until 1991.

How governments have risen and fallen since independence

Lini's Vanua'aku Pati governed until 1991, held slim majorities through the 1980s and kept a non-aligned foreign policy that took in Libya and Cuba. A vote of no confidence removed him on 6 September 1991, the party split, and after the December election Maxime Carlot Korman of the French-speaking Union of Moderate Parties became prime minister in coalition with Lini's breakaway National United Party. Britannica counts six changes of prime minister in the six years from the 1995 election.

The period was turbulent beyond parliament. In 1996 the Vanuatu Mobile Force briefly abducted the prime minister and the president in a dispute over pay. In 1998 savers rioted in Port Vila after allegations about the Vanuatu National Provident Fund, and the government declared a short state of emergency. A Comprehensive Reform Program funded by the Asian Development Bank began in 1997. Vanuatu was taken off the OECD list of uncooperative tax havens in 2003. In 2007 clashes in Port Vila between migrants from Tanna and Ambrym left two people dead.

Coalitions kept changing through motions of no confidence. In 2015 a bribery investigation ended in the conviction of several members of parliament, a former prime minister among them. Cyclone Pam struck in March 2015, and the post-disaster needs assessment put its damage and losses at 64.1% of GDP. The first case of COVID-19 was recorded in November 2020. After three changes of government in 2023, voters approved two constitutional amendments against party switching in the country's first referendum, in May 2024. In December 2024 an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck near Port Vila and killed 19 people.