I was interviewing Allan Power, the grand old master of diving in Santo, on his verandah when Tim Gilder, manager of Allan’s dive operation, walked by and said to Allan, with a smile, “Looks like Fiji is going to go again.” Without an explanation, I knew exactly what Tim was talking about.

On December 6, I wrote here about the history of ethnic tension and coups in Fiji and noted that it seemed just a matter of time until they had another. Well …

Last week, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, the head of the Fijian military, threatened to remove the current government. Sandhya, my wife, is always trying to grasp the exact definition of irony. Well, sweetie, the reason Bainimarama wants to stage a coup is just dripping with irony--he thinks the current government is being too lenient with those who took part in the last coup in 2000.

Bainimarama, who as military leader put down the 2000 coup, is also accusing a former subordinate of threatening to kill him and conspiring with the government to remove him.

Rumors have filtered through to Vanuatu that the coup already happened (not true), and that there are curfews and police are preventing public gatherings (veracity unknown). But I've been in touch with people there and they now tell me that everything has been blown a little out of proportion and that it should not affect my travel plans. That's good, because I'll be back in Fiji tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I want to say more about Vanuatu. I haven’t written as much here as I have in other places because there is simply more to do. In addition to diving and hanging out with divers, there is a friendly community made up of expats and aid volunteers who are nice enough to invite visiting journalists out for kava or a beer. (There are also just scads and scads of missionaries. They travel in packs and I find myself crossing the street when I see them coming.) White people like these expats have passed through or settled in Melanesia for centuries, but around WWII, a strange little phenomenon started to pop up--the cargo cult.

American soldiers came at that time with all the wealth and waste that follows Americans around the globe. Across the region, groups of natives with no particular contact with one another began to believe that all that wealth, known as “cargo,” came from the spirits of their ancestors, was intended for them and had been hijacked by the whites. Many dressed and acted like soldiers, and even built fake airport, planes and radios of coconuts and palm fronds, to attract a windfall of tinned beef and consumer goods. Most of these cults faded away when the cargo planes never arrived, but here in Vanuatu, on Sulphur Bay on the island of Tanna, one of them persists--the Jon Frum Movement. (I should note here that some cargo cults seem to have arisen well before WWII, although that was seen as their heyday.)

Jon Frum is a mythical figure with a cloudy, bizarre history. He is described variously as a god who lives with an army of the dead in the cinder cone of Mount Yasur; the “king of America;” a black American GI; the son of god; a native named Manehevi who smeared white paint on his face; or an amalgam of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam and John the Baptist. To believers, he is a messianic figure who will one day return with all sorts of “cargo” for his chosen people. Occasionally people can commune with him. Kava is usually involved. And instead of a dour Sunday ritual, Frum is celebrated each Friday with drinking and dancing.

It is believed that Frum will return on February 15, so every year on that day, believers raise an American flag (and the state flag of Georgia, oddly) and march about the village with fake rifles made of bamboo. The elders wear old army uniforms while the younger men wear blue jeans and paint “USA” on their chests. Interestingly, even though acting like whites is part of the Jon Frum rituals, Frum is more commonly thought of as black, and the core of the belief system is that people should return to their traditional (or kastom) lifestyles--it is not some kind of strange American-worship. In fact, the Frum movement was the first real popular uprising against the goofy Anglo-French condominium government and all the missionaries that still prowl the islands. Some see in it the seeds of Vanuatu’s independence, the leading edge of political and social reform. Plus, Frum is a black messiah for black people in the same mold as Jesus and Mohammed, a truly original mash-up of Christianity and traditional beliefs. Others, however, see the movement as an anachronistic embarrassment to a legitimate developing nation.

I don’t want to make Vanuatu seem like a sideshow with all these odd little stories, but they are a little too interesting not to tell. It is just a hugely diverse place for such a small country. Even though everyone is Melanesian, I think that person-for-person there are more languages and more diversity of beliefs here than almost anywhere else in the world (including Queens).