Yu Blong Wea

Chapter 1: An Introduction

1.1 Positioning the Study: A Focus on Struggle

1.2 When things are not simple: Outlining the Theoretical Framework

1.2.1 Multiple Worlds

1.2.2 The Folding of Time

1.3 Vanuatu: A Note on Geography, Demography, and a History of Land Struggle

1.3.1 A History of Land

1.3.2 The Politics of Land

1.3.3 From Mother to Commodity?

1.4 Outline of Thesis

Chapter 2: On Entering the Field & Methodology

2.1 The Field

2.2 Access and the Implications of Becoming Part of it All

2.3 Navigating the River

Chapter 3: The Place, the People, and the Struggles

3.1 Snapshot of a Home

3.2 Money and Taro

3.3 Yu Blong Wea (where are you from)? The Struggles Unfolded

3.3.1 “We Have the Right to Keep the Land Always”

3.3.2 “The Problem is With all Those Man Kam…”

3.4 Concluding Remarks

Chapter 4: Giaman Stori and the Multiplicity of Truth

4.1 Speaking One’s Mind

4.2 According to Kastom

4.2.1 Significance: “Kastom Hem i Stap”

4.2.2 Meaning: “This is not the Way of Kastom”

4.3 Worlds in the Making

4.3.1 Multiple Worlds – Multiple Truths

4.4 Concluding Remarks

Chapter 5: Anticipation, Hope, and the Wait

5.1 Uncertain Futures and Ways of Anticipation

5.1.1 “We Need to Secure Our Titles”: Anticipating Risk of Future Land Loss

5.1.2 For the Common Good: Anticipating Trouble and Scarcity of Land

5.1.3 “We Will Keep Fighting”: Strategies of Resistance

5.2 While There is Still Hope

5.2.1 Conflict Persists

5.2.2 And Hope Remains

5.3 Concluding Remarks

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Epilogue

Bibliography

Abstract (in Danish)

Appendix 1: List of Informants

Appendix 2: Map of Mele Maat’s Land Titles

Chapter 1: Introduction

The ocean stretches out behind us, calm and turquoise, as my new acquaintance and I walk away from the beach café and make our way towards the main road. I feel nervous and excited at the same time. Enneth, as the young woman is called, has agreed to take me along to meet her family in Mele Maat, the village where she lives, and where I hope to be allowed further access.

Telling me about her family and their way of living, Enneth guides me to turn left as we reach the paved road. The sun burns down and humidity makes sweat trickle down our foreheads. Alongside the road, trees and bushes stand tall and lush. Busses and cars pass us occasionally at high speed as they transport people to town in search of work or a possibility to sell their crops at the big market in Port Vila, the capital city. I feel exposed walking. There is no space for pedestrians and every time a vehicle zooms by it forces us to seek refuge in the verge on the side of the road. Also, many stare at us. They seem  unaccustomed with the sight of a white and a black girl walking next to each other.

We walk on, passing gardens filled with plants the height of a person. On the other side of the road some houses are visible in between tall trees and bushes. After 20 minutes of walking, Enneth declares that we have arrived at Mele Maat. To our left I notice the deserted village cemetery, and further ahead a group of young men are playing football in an adjoining field. Across from the collection of gravestones and their colourful plastic flower décor a big open space spreads out covered in short grass and encircled by trees in various sizes and shapes. Occupying the part of the lawn closest to us is a big, white concrete building with a blue roof. Enneth tells me that this is the Presbyterian Church. Further down is another building, the community hall, which makes a somewhat poorer appearance with its grey concrete walls and corrugated iron roof. Behind it, many small houses are visible. Most of them look like they are built from imported materials, and corrugated iron dominates. Looking around it seems that metal has replaced wood to a large extent. Thatched houses are nowhere to be seen.

Leaving the paved road behind, we turn right and make our way down a muddy path which, I find out later, makes out one of several entrances to the village. A few chickens walk around the patches of grass alongside the path, and a pig makes a bit of noise inside a small paddock. Rain has come down in torrents the last few weeks and our feet sink into the mud as we try to avoid the largest puddles. It is difficult. Some are as wide as the path, and we have to jump to get across. Still my sandals sink into the muddy ground. As I pull them out, they send cascades of mud up my legs.

I notice that on our left, the houses are placed very close to one another. Most look small and a bit shabby. On our right there are only trees and bushes, but as we walk on a big grassy lawn appears with a house made of concrete situated about 50 metres from where we are. The contrast is noticeable. Later, I discovered that the path on which we were walking constituted the dividing line between Mele and Mele Maat. With a population of more than 18511 people Mele village dwarfs its smaller neighbour in both numbers and size. Furthermore, while Mele occupies a large area to accommodate its inhabitants, Mele Maat’s approximately 1000 residents share a rather small area which has entailed a need to construct houses very close to one another, something which gives the village a somewhat poorer look.

Having left the grassy lawn behind Enneth directs me to turn left, and by doing so we arrive at an open compound. A house is situated on each side and in the back a few buildings appear. Up until now we have not met a single soul, but now an elderly man approaches us, smiling. Reaching out his strong, rough hand he introduces himself and while shaking it I tell him my name. Enneth explains that this is her grandfather. We say goodbye and walk down to the end of the compound where the house which Enneth shares with her mother and father, as well as two sisters and three brothers, is situated. As with most of the houses I have seen so far, the family home is constructed mainly from corrugated iron. As we enter the front door I notice the concrete floor, the small worn out couch and a little kitchen table with a tap and a sink. Slabs of wood make out some of the walls inside. One of these is covered with old posters displaying male and female fashion
models from the 1980’s with big hair and colourful outfits. Enneth’s father gives me a big smile and welcomes me to their home, telling me that his name is Thomson. Enneth’s mother also approaches me, although a bit more shyly. She gives me her hand and says her name is Leah. While Thomson is dressed in shorts and t‐shirt, Leah is wearing a colourful island dress displaying a flower pattern. Also, Thomson’s bald head is a contrast to the black halo surrounding Leah’s.

Thanking them for their hospitality, I am directed to the couch while Thomson sits down on a white container next to me. Enneth draws forward a small, rickety office chair for herself, and Leah together with the youngest daughter, Moala, places herself on a traditional mat made of palm leaves which covers a large part of the concrete floor. Feeling a need to explain, I tell them about myself and the project I am here to carry out. When I mention that I have a particular interest in the Mele Maat people, because they originally came from another island to settle down here on Efate, Thomson immediately begins to tell me their story.

*

This thesis is about stories and it is about truth. But most of all it is about conflict. Arriving in Vanuatu with four months of ethnographic fieldwork stretching out ahead of me, I wanted to explore the meanings of land and the way people, who move from their place of origin towards the urban areas, establish identity and a sense of belonging in a location to which they have no prior connection or rights. However, I was taken aback as I began to discover just how contested these issues had become.

A former colony, Vanuatu has experienced extensive land alienation and control during the 20th century. Growing resistance to colonial rule and exploitation finally brought about independence and a declaration that all land must be returned to the original kastom owners2 – a term referring to those holding ownership of land areas prior to the intrusion of waet man (white man). While set forth with the amiable purpose to restore rights over land in the hands of ni-Vanuatu (the people of Vanuatu), this declaration resulted in widespread unrest as arguments flared up between people all over the archipelago about who was really the true kastom owner of specific pieces of land. Today, more than 30 years after Vanuatu gained its independence, ferocious disputes over land still shake the nation, and arguments remain about who can rightfully claim to be the rightful people, that is, those who belong to a certain place and consequently hold rights over land.

Taking as its starting point the empirical setting of Mele Maat, a village situated 10 km outside the capital city on the island Efate, this thesis focuses on two specific land struggles which had already been ongoing for years, one playing out between Mele Maat and their neighbouring village Mele, and another unfolding among people within Mele Maat itself. Differences put aside for now both were concerned with land and with claiming one’s own rights or disclaiming the rights of others, and both were characterised by an abundance of stories about past events ‐ and their meaning and significance – many of which collided strongly with one another.

Retrospectively, during my first meeting with the people who ended up becoming my host family and closest friends and informants (described above) I was introduced for the first time to this practice of narrating the past, though at the time I did not recognise its importance. Having just sat down on the plastic container next to me, Thomson began on a detailed story in which the trajectories of the Mele Maat people unfolded. He told me about how they had been forced to evacuate their home island as a consequence of the destructive residue shot out from the fiery belly of Mt. Benbow more than 60 years ago; how the colonial government brought them all to the island Epi where they stayed until a storm hit, causing a devastating mud slide which killed so many people that the sea turned red; how they finally managed to settle down on Efate while working for the French plantation owner, André Houdié, who let them buy four plots of his land on which they could establish their village and cultivate gardens. This became Mele Maat, named after its proximity to Mele as well as the village from which they came, Maat.

As with so many other stories of what had happened and what it meant, this story was told to me repeatedly and by many different people during my stay in the village. However, while the contents of this specific story, relating the dramatic journey which shaped the Mele Maat people and their fundamental claim to the land on which they now lived, was to a large extent agreed on by all, the opposite turned out to be true regarding almost every other story concerned with belonging and rights to land. Living among my informants these diverse interpretations of what was true became a source of puzzlement, but as time progressed I began to realise that the content of the stories could not be understood by way of binary oppositions such as true and false. Rather, truth turned out to be multiple, and this multiplicity had specific manifestations which shaped the struggles over land.

As such, while remaining humble towards the complexity involved in the issue with which I am concerned, in this thesis I will: explore the production and perseverance of conflict as it unfolded in the village of Mele Maat. More specifically I will investigate the multiplicity of truth and its implications for the ongoing land struggles. The overall concern which traverses this endeavour is to understand the relationship between the multiple truths and the ongoing struggles over land. By focusing on multiplicity I will show how my informants through their narratives established diverging social worlds which were often fundamentally different from one another. Each provided the narrators with categorical schemata for interpreting past and present events and developments, and each shaped how people understood their need to struggle and how they chose to do it. My main argument is that the multiplicity of truth was both part of what spurred the conflicts onwards and what upheld a certain kind of social stability within the context of conflict.

Acknowledging that the multiplicity of truth was not alone in affecting the production and perseverance of struggle, I have chosen to expand the analysis to include other factors as well. This means that I investigate selected elements which each and in their combination had impact on the conflicts with which I am concerned, and while some of these seemed to be connected to the production of truths, others worked quite independently from it. Approaching the subject of study like this has been a way to deal with the profound complexity I discovered in the field.

Upon having, in this introduction, unfolded some of the themes that serve as focal point for the thesis and its analytical endeavour, the remaining chapter will fall in four parts. First, I will position the present study within the regional literature on land struggles in order to show how it contributes to the existing body of knowledge. Secondly, I will outline the theoretical framework applied in the thesis to shed light on the questions posed. Having done so, thirdly the overall empirical setting will be introduced with a specific focus on land in a historical, political and symbolic perspective, and finally I will lay bare an overview of the remaining parts of the thesis.