The secondary school at Ranwadi sits on the edge of an invisible divide. The primary school at Lalzadet, a few minutes' walk up the hill from Ranwadi, sits on the other side. The two schools are physically so close that you can hear the shouts of children playing. People walk freely between the two, and they appear to serve the same community. There is no racial or socio-economic difference between the two, and no bad feeling between them. The pupils grow up speaking the same language. Yet none of the pupils who graduate from Lalzadet will ever be able to attend Ranwadi.
Even outside school, Lalzadet's pupils rarely meet Ranwadi's. They attend different churches and different social events, and only rarely attend the same weddings and funerals. Their parents farm different patches of land, and do paid work in different workplaces. It is not inconceivable that a given pupil from Ranwadi might grow up to marry someone who graduated from Lalzadet, particularly if they meet somewhere far away, perhaps in one of Vanuatu's two towns, where the divide will count for less and coming from the same island will count for more. But it is far more likely that they will settle down with people from their respective sides of the divide, and bring up children who go to the same schools as their parents, extending the divide to the next generation, like an ever-lengthening crack in a growing tree.
Rural Vanuatu is crazy-paved with hundreds of these invisible divides. They are a legacy of the country's unique colonial history, in which for nearly a century the island chain was ruled jointly by the British and French. Every single aspect of government and society was duplicated: there were British and French administrators, British and French schools, British and French hospitals. At an early stage in the territory's development there were even British vehicles driving on the left hand side of the road and French vehicles driving on the right. (When traffic growth made this unsustainable, the territory was forced to choose at random between the two, and the French won the draw. To this day Vanuatu, unlike most neighbouring countries, drives on the right.) British and French citizens were subject to separate laws, policed by separate police forces. Lawbreakers were tried in separate own courts, and sentenced to separate prisons (citizens of other countries could choose whether to be British or French for legal purposes). A single unified institution, the Joint Court, arbitrated as necessary between the two sides. Natives who stayed out of the way of the British and French were stateless and not subject to any law or justice at all other than that meted out by their village chiefs.
At independence in 1980, these duplicate systems of law and government were replaced overnight with a single national administration. Yet as colonialism receded like the tide from a drying shoreline, it left a network of cracks and fault-lines in the substrate, superimposed over older cracks that the tides had blurred but not fully washed away. The new divisions were not straight lines drawn by administrators on a map, like the mid-western states of America or the new nations of Africa. They had grown organically, where slabs of identity re-crystallised out of the rich but violently stirred-up cultural soup from which the two colonial powers had just withdrawn their spoons.
The seed crystals around which these new identities grew were church missions. Ranwadi, and most of the villages along the coast for several miles south of it, belong to the Churches of Christ, a mildly evangelical association of worshippers that found its way to Vanuatu via Queensland, where many Pacific islanders had been transported to work on plantations at the end of the 19th century. This is a region of loosely-organised, clappy, spiritual village churches with tin rooves and fenced lawns, which organise a rotating programme of combined events and sing about casting out the devil as they share out biscuits and fruit cordial. They read the Bible in English, and preach in Bislama, the company language that came back along with the church from the plantations of Queensland.
On the other side of the divide, elaborate concrete crosses commemorate the arrival in the 1890s of French missionaries. Here one finds Catholicism in all its grandeur, images of the Virgin Mary peering from rock faces and village chapels, a huge central church in Melsisi to which the eleven surrounding communities gather for Sunday and holy-day masses, white-frocked priests and blue-robed nuns, soulful Latin-style chanting and real wine forming the blood of Christ.
The doctrinal differences between the two churches matter little to most people here. What matters is that, in communities whose social calendar is dominated by the church (people count weeks here by counting Sundays), the two groups do not regularly mix. The church boundary also coincides with an administrative boundary - the Melsisi area is in the lower half of Central Pentecost for local-government purposes, the area beyond Ranwadi is in the South - so the two groups attend different workshops and awareness meetings and liaise with different officials too.
The doctrinal differences between the two churches matter little to most people here. What matters is that, in communities whose social calendar is dominated by the church (people count weeks here by counting Sundays), the two groups do not regularly mix. The church boundary also coincides with an administrative boundary - the Melsisi area is in the lower half of Central Pentecost for local-government purposes, the area beyond Ranwadi is in the South - so the two groups attend different workshops and awareness meetings and liaise with different officials too.
The separation is far from total: there is no Berlin Wall or Demilitarized Zone here. People know, and mostly get on perfectly well with, their neighbours on the other side of the divide. They travel between areas for the bank (which is in Melsisi), the airport (which is in the Churches of Christ area), medical treatment (which is best at the French-built Melsisi hospital), refuelling trucks (wherever one can find diesel), and numerous other practical reasons. Yet at the events which really bring out the community - weddings, funerals, school open days, fundraisers, and of course anything to do with the church - the divide is striking. People from one side attend en masse, but you can count on one hand the number of people who have crossed from the other side, and some of those were probably just passing by on their way to drop off a carton at the airport or find a drum of diesel. A century of this has had an enormous impact on friendships and family relations. A family tree of the two areas (everyone is related here), or a social network-style graph of personal connections, would resemble two dense balls of wool with just a few assorted threads joining the two.
The difference that is most striking to foreign visitors is the one that affects local villagers least in their everyday lives. Ranwadi College and the associated primary school at Ranmawot teach in English, while the Collège de Melsisi and associated primary schools such as Lalzadet teach in French. Yet while this profoundly affects anyone seeking employment as a schoolteacher or tour guide, or wishing to transfer their child between schools, these languages are so little used outside the classroom that they do not create a noticeable barrier to anyone seeking to make friends, marry or do business across the divide. The Ranwadi and Melsisi areas are not divided by their two educational languages any more than Westerners who elected to take Spanish classes at school are socially divided from those who elected to take Japanese. What matters is social ties, and the church, and the subtle but noticeable ways in which these have now infused into the two areas' traditions.
The Catholic mission at Melsisi put down very deep roots into the area's traditional culture, from which it became inseparable. Pre-Christian habits were tolerated as long as they didn't obviously contradict Jesus's teachings: pigs continued to be killed in elaborate grade-taking ceremonies, and big church occasions were celebrated with kava-drinking and traditional dancing after mass. Early in its history, the Melsisi mission even participated to some extent in the age-old inter-village warfare that occurred in its mountainous hinterland. In 1942, after an escalating spiral of violence between Christianised villagers (armed and supported by the mission) and their non-Christianised neighbours had culminated in a chief being killed, the priest was brought before a French court and accused of inciting the natives to murder. He was acquitted on the grounds that murder among the natives was not actually a crime, since it fell outside both British and French jurisdiction. In response to incidents such as the 'Melsisi Wars', the following year the two colonial governments introduced a native law code to northern Vanuatu, adding a third legal system alongside the British and French ones. By the 1950s, when the huge Melsisi church house was constructed, everyone in the Melsisi area had converted to Christianity and the warfare became a thing of the past.
French missionaries at Melsisi all learned Apma, the predominant local language, and had prayers and hymns translated into it. One particularly well-loved foreign priest, Père Durumain, continued to visit Melsisi every year, long after he had retired from the priesthood and left Vanuatu. I met him there a few years ago, and since my French is abysmal the locals were treated to the spectacle of two white Europeans conversing in the area's tribal language. I encountered Père Durumain again in Melsisi last year, being lowered into the mission ground in accordance with his final wishes. Being a Catholic priest, he had no children to mourn him, but a crowd of hundreds - all from the Melsisi side of the divide, of course - had gathered around the ornate mission cemetery to mourn him as they would a respected chief. Père Durumain had lived and worked in many places but Melsisi was the one where he wanted to stay.
No funeral could have had a more stunning backdrop. While Ranwadi is beautiful in the manner of a postcard Mediterranean village, with brightly-painted buildings and verandas and flowers and rocks and climbing plants, Melsisi up close is shabby at times, too much peeling cement and cow manure and half-rusted corrugated iron. Zoom out, however, and Melsisi is awesomely beautiful, a great panorama of green mountainside and deep ocean which afternoon sunbeams and showers and the wind racing over the island fill with watercolour and swell to the heavens with light and air.
The area of South-Central Pentecost centred on the Ranwadi side of the divide historically had a unique culture, intermediate in some ways between Central and South Pentecost's, but with some distinctive features of its own. (The old cultural boundary did not correspond with the modern divide: historic South-Central Pentecost extended north-west to Melsisi River and north-east to Salaba, where deep valleys created natural barriers to the movement of people in the days before the building of the coastal road.) South-Central Pentecost had a pair of related languages, Sowa and Ske, intermediate in evolutionary terms between the major languages of Central and South Pentecost but fairly incomprehensible to speakers of either. The region's people dressed sometimes in long red mats, as in Central Pentecost, and sometimes in penis wrappers and grass skirts, as in the South. They killed pigs in rituals similar to, but subtly different from, those performed elsewhere. Some claim that they practiced land diving, but in a different style to that now performed in the South. They had their own beliefs, their own special places, their own stories, their own words for things and their own histories.
There is no evidence that the Churches of Christ missionaries who came and went in this area ever noticed any of this. Integrating into the local culture was not what they had come for; nobody needed any of that when they were with Jesus. The dancing stopped, the sacred pigs were relegated to the status of mere livestock, and the kava-making platters and drinking shells were thrown into pits and buried. (There are numerous stories of renegade kava-lovers secretly digging them out again.) To my knowledge I was the first foreigner to attempt to learn either Sowa or Ske, and that was over a century after the first white teacher arrived from Queensland. Population movements helped wipe the cultural slate clean. Epidemics of newly-introduced diseases hit this area hard - its modern population of several hundred can trace their ancestry back to only a couple of dozen men. The survivors regrouped in new and modernised villages along the west coast, where long beaches provided easy landings for cargo ships, and the flat coastal strips were transformed into coconut plantations.
When the population recovered and became culturally self-confident again, those still interested in traditional customs had to import them from elsewhere on the island. Leaders who felt they ought to kill pigs did so with the help of relatives from Central Pentecost, across the divide, and in accordance with that area's customs. Pigs and mats still changed hands at weddings, but in smaller numbers than in the Melsisi area. Kava-drinking made a comeback, but coexisted uneasily with the churchgoing side of the region's new culture. Whereas at Melsisi, drinkers gather convivially in crowded bars and nakamals at sunset in a haze of leaf-tobacco smoke and begin the evening by asking God to bless their traditional drink (bars customarily give a free shell-full to the person who says the prayer), in the Churches of Christ area, the handful of ramshackle and meagrely-provisioned kava bars are tolerated by the community's elders in the same spirit in which liberal cities tolerate red light districts. Lively, sweary men with 1.5-litre plastic bottles and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths hitch rides on trucks up and down the area's one main road in search of a bar whose kava bucket isn't yet empty, and do not say grace.
With the arrival of imported wives and customs from further north, Apma became South-Central Pentecost's most widely-known vernacular. And with the spread of Bislama, now graduated from a plantation pidgin into a national language, people in the Churches of Christ area are increasingly abandoning vernacular languages altogether. (In the Melsisi area, by contrast, Apma remains almost universally spoken, even among individuals and communities who did not ancestrally speak it.) Sowa died out as a living language at the end of the 20th century, and judging by how few children can be heard speaking it today, Ske will follow at the end of the 21st century. A linguist, with funding from organisations that seek to preserve endangered languages, came and worked with Ske speakers on the tedious task of trying to document the language, went home and got awarded a PhD for her research, but nearly a decade later the community is still waiting forlornly for the schoolbooks, videos or other materials that they were promised in return for their hard work. Parents and grandparents still do their best to speak to their children in Ske, but their children no longer answer them. Infants who know no better will happily repeat words of the old language, but they ditch them in favour of Bislama words as soon as they become old enough to figure out which is the language of the past and which is the language of the future. A generation of toddlers has collectively decided that the time has come to chuck out the last substantial surviving piece of old South-Central Pentecost culture, and there seems to be nothing their elders can do to stop them.
In place of historic traditions, the Churches of Christ missionaries and their congregations built new ties. Whereas the Collège de Melsisi serves almost exclusively the local community, Ranwadi College is cosmopolitan, with students and teachers coming and going from Churches of Christ areas in other parts of the country, and a few from non-Churches of Christ areas too. This creates further differences between the two schools. Teaching at Melsisi starts on Day 1 of every new term - there is no excuse not to, since although it is a boarding school most students can walk there from home in a few hours - and every fortnight the students are sent home for a weekend. At Ranwadi, the first couple of weeks of every term are spent waiting for ships and planes to bring the students back to school (nobody is in a hurry), but once the students are there, they are stuck there for the term. Ranwadi's students get a richer experience in some ways, but pay for this through malnourishment (kids eat better in their villages), homesickness and missed lessons, not to mention ship and plane fares. Melsisi is a little more straight-laced than Ranwadi: parents and community leaders are close by and watching, and well-salaried teachers are set apart from their relatives in the villages solely by how professionally they behave. Ranwadi has more of a college campus vibe, inhabited by students who are keen on study but laid-back about actually attending classes, overseen by knowledgeable but slightly erratic dons who create the air that if you spend long enough there, you'll absorb a certain amount of wisdom just by inhaling the smell of old books and the breeze.
White missionaries no longer run Ranwadi, but volunteers and church groups come regularly to build new classrooms, donate books or help with teaching. The first local principal to run the school maintained ties with the Queensland churches from which Ranwadi had sprung, and visited England too. He came back with ideas and visions of what the new South-Central Pentecost could be like, built firmly upon what was left of the old one. Dance on special occasions if you want to, he told the pupils - it's part of your culture. With toolboxes and church donations, foreign volunteers and local recruits now busy themselves while they wait for the Kingdom of God by building little bits of Queensland on the island they know and love. People sing songs of praise, go fishing together, do what they can to make use of newly-donated drills and screwdrivers before local hands can break them, enjoy the waterfalls and beaches, share out more biscuits and fruit cordial (now chilled in newly-installed solar-powered freezers), and find friends and even family members in faraway places. One Australian missionary's daughter married into the community and is still there. Another overseas teacher built a house in the local village and started an annual programme of summer camps that was so successful it even expanded to take in pupils from across the divide.
It was Ranwadi that brought me to Pentecost. I was in no sense a church missionary, but the old principal had prayed for as many people as possible to participate in fulfilling whatever plan God had for his school and his community, and warm-heartedly welcomed support in whatever form it came, even from people who had yet to acknowledge their sender. But he also seemed to understand why I continually crossed the divide, clocking up hundreds of miles walking back and forth on the Ranwadi-Melsisi road, what experience I was seeking that I couldn't have found in either area alone. The old principal later spent time tramping that road himself, after politics forced him to retire from Ranwadi, and Melsisi needed somebody to help teach English as an additional language. Ranwadi, for its part, has employed plenty of ex-Melsisi students and teachers in its French department. I also recently joined the list of teachers who have served time at both schools. If Vanuatu's future professionals needed both English and French, then Ranwadi and Melsisi needed one another.
Even in politics, the most divisive force in Vanuatu, it is possible to bridge the divide. It goes without saying that the two sides have always voted for different politicians. On the Ranwadi side, the former principal succeeded last year in getting elected to Parliament, with the highest vote share on the island, trading his walking shoes and English textbooks for a black suit and shiny government-registered vehicle. He represents the party founded by Walter Lini, the English-schooled Anglican priest who led Vanuatu to independence, whose obituary in The Economist began, "one of Walter Lini’s minor pleasures was to get the better of the French". On the other side of the divide, Melsisi is the alma mater of Vanuatu's current Prime Minister, who leads a party that grew out of the French-backed movement which had opposed independence under Lini (believing that the time was not right and fearing marginalisation from those poised to lead the new republic). The two politicians' home villages are a mere three miles apart, on opposite sides of the divide. Under Vanuatu's odd electoral system, in which voters think in intensely local terms but big islands function as single giant constituencies whose multiple MPs and voter groups are left to hash out among themselves who truly represents whom, it is unusual for two politicians to get elected from the same area: two high-profile candidates would merely split the local vote. The co-existence here of two big political beasts in the same patch of jungle is made possible by the divide, each drawing votes from his own side. Yet the former principal serves under the Prime Minister in the same coalition government, and although their supporters have sometimes scrapped, outwardly at least the two big men themselves seem to work well together. Any account of Vanuatu politics that describes it as being fundamentally divided between English- and French-oriented sides is now out of date.
Just as the fragmentation of political parties and interminable 'crossing of the floor' by opportunistic politicians slowly broke down the independence-era English/French divide in Vanuatu politics, a proliferation of new churches and social groups may yet break down the social divide between the Ranwadi and Melsisi areas. Already there are breakaway groups in the two areas who adhere neither to Catholicism nor the Churches of Christ. Defining people is becoming harder and harder, and when you keep dividing and dividing again, down to atoms, eventually all that is left is unity.
The division between English and French languages in Vanuatu schools will persist for the foreseeable future: that divide is written firmly into the country's constitution. (Walter Lini and his colleagues had contemplated making English the sole language of education in the new republic, but backed down after the French-educated population, fearing that their most important skill might suddenly be made redundant, took to the streets in the largest protest the country has ever seen.) But the French schools may increasingly become French schools only in name. With two colonial languages, a national language (Bislama) and at least 140 indigenous vernaculars, Vanuatu is overburdened with languages, and since English is the major international language of the Pacific region, Bislama is needed as a lingua franca and the vernaculars are all valued by those who speak them as important parts of their cultural heritage, French educators have long been painfully aware that theirs is the language the country can best afford to lose. Their response has been to embrace English alongside French. Send a child to an English-speaking school in Vanuatu, and they will learn English, the idea goes, but send a child to a French-speaking school, and they will acquire both English and French. The English-speaking schools find it hard to counter this offer. Their pupils and graduates struggle hard enough to figure out where to put -s and -ed on English words. (On my last trip to town I broke down at the sight of the third or fourth "sorry we're close" sign - I was wasting my life trying to teach English in this country – and without saying a word, grabbed the shopkeeper's marker pen and amended the sign.) Getting pupils to also master French, with its dozens of identical-sounding 'terminations' and its own irregularity-ridden spelling system and grammar, is just too much. Schools try, but the average Ranwadi graduate's command of French is comparable to that of a holidaymaker who picked up some catchphrases and learned a few items on the restaurant menu during his two weeks in Paris. French-educated pupils, by contrast, have a head start in the other language because of its similarity to Bislama, which evolved out of Pidgin English. The debate about the status of French in Vanuatu might be revived in a generation's time, when the country finds itself with an educated class who all now know English regardless of what school they attended, but that is a concern for the future.
At Melsisi today, the posters on the classroom walls are in French, but the graffiti is largely in English. Like Ske speakers' children, the pupils here too are capable of making their own choices about which is the language of the future. In the system the Collège de Melsisi uses for totting up a pupil's overall grade, Anglais is the third-most important subject on the curriculum. (Ranwadi ranks subjects less systematically, but when its pupils choose what to study in their senior years, French is nearly everyone's last choice.) The English written in the Melsisi students' cahiers is mistake-ridden, but not drastically worse than that of Ranwadi students of the same age. (Melsisi students' work differs from Ranwadi students' in that it has random bits of French thrown in - "the coq call and the dog suivre the farmer" - but this is actually rather helpful from a teaching point of view, as the teacher can see exactly what concept the student was hoping to convey.) A French-speaking university donated a dozen computers to the school, but they were set up in English. When the computer teacher asked me write some worksheets to help the pupils with their informatique, it bothered nobody that they were not in French. When introducing adult Melsisi-educated friends to English-speaking visitors, I'm often asked to interpret, but if I go off to the toilet or disappear to fetch something it's likely that I'll come back to find them conversing adequately without me. And discussion on social media forums in Vanuatu is overwhelmingly in English or Bislama. When I once asked why, several French-educated ni-Vanuatu replied (some in good English) that it is because only half their countrymen would understand their French, whereas the other two languages are at least partly accessible to everyone. Some also commented that whether someone in Vanuatu speaks English or French is not important to them anyway; those two foreign languages are not part of their identities.
At Ranwadi, the school bakery - a smartly-painted concrete building by the main road across from the beach, built in memory of a foreign volunteer - turns out daily batches of big, square loaves, just as the Queensland missionaries liked them. At Melsisi, the bakery is a big, dark old building, more traditional in style, with a spectacular view off the edge of the precipice behind the mission. Its staple is French-style baguettes, though in response to local demand, it also does a sideline in English-style loaves. That sums up the difference between the two schools. Both sets of bread are produced in the same sort of old wood-fired ovens from the same brand of flour, and taste pretty similar. They are delicious when you get them at the right time, fresh from the warmth of the fires, but do not keep particularly well. I sometimes carry bread across the divide - Melsisi's bakers keep to a more predictable schedule, and I can't be sure of finding the Ranwadi bakery open. People on the other side are mildly surprised to see Melsisi bread in the kitchen, but they eat it quite happily. Nobody even associates 'stick bread' with the French any more. It is simply a variant on a common theme.
