Leading Lights in the 'Mother of Darkness': Perspectives on Leadership and Value in North Ambrym, Vanuatu‪.‬

Heading in a small boat towards North Ambrym, an island in north-central Vanuatu in 1999, I asked the young man at the outboard about the recent death of the famous leader and notorious sorcerer, Rengreng Mal. 'How did he die'? I inquired disingenuously, having already heard one account of the sorcery that killed him. 'From malaria', he replied with a pause for effect. 'Malaria?' I repeated. 'That's right, the malaria of Ambrym' he explained, as we all broke into raucous laughter. Rarely a laughing matter, sorcery is perceived by North Ambrymese to be a major factor in the recent government classification of this, the most populous part of the island as a 'backward area' and indeed, one of the reasons why one cannot reach it by air, unlike the west and south-east of the island. (1) Recently, in the latest of several abortive attempts to clear an airstrip after years of acrimonious negotiation over its siting, workers fled when one of their number was mysteriously drowned, his death widely rumoured to be the result of Ambrym sorcery. Neither the ubiquity of sorcery discourse in North Ambrym nor the reputation of the island as 'the Mother of Darkness', is new. This epithet was applied by missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to an island where opposition to their efforts was carried on with constant recourse to threats of sorcery against converts and the missionaries themselves by the leaders they referred to as 'chiefs'. Sorcery was part of the leaders' armory, used to perpetuate a system of inequality in which the young in particular, but also most women, were at a decided disadvantage. In the mid 1990s a watershed area of North Ambrym featured in a pilot study for a partly UN funded project- 'Pacific Regional Equitable and Sustainable Human Development Programme' (1996). In this particular area, over 50% of all land was under dispute according to government reports, leading to a failure to implement infrastructural projects like water supplies, health clinics and schools and to encroachment into the rainforest for subsistence agriculture at a rate of almost a kilometre per year. The preliminary diagnosis of the problem as 'breakdown in human interaction', linked the lack of 'community' to the land disputes, rather than seeing the disputes themselves as symptomatic of a much deeper malaise in the whole of North Ambrym that had its immediate roots in the history of the colonial period in the district.