John Frum

The last cargo cult
by Mike Jay

It's shortly after dawn on February 15th on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific. The oppressive humidity and heat of the rainy season is already building, the pigs and chickens are slowly stirring, and - as on every February 15th for the last 45 years - one of the world's strangest religious ceremonies is about to take place.
The village of Sulphur Bay is waking up, as it does every morning, directly under an active volcano. The cone of Mount Yasur steeples up above it, thumping periodically as blisters of magma burst inside its crater, and scattering ash onto the dead plains around its base like a carbon snowfall. On the coastal side of the village is a black sand beach running with steaming rivulets of scalding spring water, too hot to touch but ideal for washing clothes and dishes. Between the devil and the deep, the palm and thatch huts are arranged quite untypically for a Melanesian village: not around a central clan hut or banyan tree but framing a large, deserted square like a parade ground. This is because Sulphur Bay is one of a handful of villages in this part of the world where the people neither worship the Christ of the missionaries nor practice the traditional kastom (custom) religion of their ancestors, but who live with a god of their own: a spirit messiah known as John Frum.
John Frum is the son of God, but he's not Jesus. He's a black Melanesian, but sometimes a white man - or, according to others, a black American GI. He's a kastom messiah, come to turn the people of Tanna back to their old ways before the missionaries - but he's also a universal avatar of change, a successor to Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed. Like Jesus, he's poised to return - or, perhaps, he's already here. He's a volcano god, with an army of the dead who live down in the crater, and a spirit who approaches the men of Tanna when they drink their intoxicating kava and bring their spirits into communion with him. Back in the days of colonial rule when he first appeared, the British thought he was one of the locals dressing up and spouting nonsense to foment rebellion. They arrested a succession of 'troublemakers', pillorying them before their community to expose the deception, but the locals knew perfectly well that John Frum was neither this man nor that one. Apart from anything else, he continued to appear. So, a new tactic: anyone who was found to be talking John Frum nonsense was hauled off to jail in Port Vila, the administrative capital over a hundred miles away. But these 'ringleaders' became martyrs to the growing religion, and the stories of how John appeared to them in jail are now part of the canon of oral traditions, hymns and revelations of the new religion.
To anthropologists, John Frum was an example of one of the strangest and most exotic phenomena to be observed in traditional cultures: the cargo cult. All across Melanesia, from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands to Tanna's archipelago, the New Hebrides, dozens of unconnected communities, thousands of miles apart and speaking unrelated languages, seemed spontaneously to generate the same set of bizarre beliefs. A new dispensation was on the way, when the white man would vanish from the islands, and his cargo - Western goods - would be diverted by magical means to the local people, who were its rightful owners.
'Cargo cults' got into full swing during the 1950s, though once the phenomenon had been classified by Westerners it seemed that the beginnings of the movement could be traced way back, as far as the 1890s. The classic account was by the Australian anthropologist Peter Lawrence who went out to the Madang district of New Guinea in 1949 to conduct field research into the traditional social relations of people who, despite colonial rule, were still living much as they had in the recent Stone Age. Lawrence gradually discovered that his presence in Madang had become woven into an extraordinary complex of beliefs. Persistent rumours abounded that a cargo ship was about to arrive in the harbour with huge consignments of goods for him, and the local people asked him to help them supervise the clearing of an airstrip. When he asked what the airstrip was for, he was told that cargo planes were about to arrive bringing tinned meat, rice, tools, tobacco and a machine for making electric light. And when he asked who was sending this cargo, they replied 'God in Heaven'.

http://www.nthposition.com/thelastcargo.php


I read about this in Smithsonion Magazine last night-