By Gordon Barlow.

(An extract from an essay about tax-havens posted 3 November 2010).

Nearly thirty years ago my wife and I worked and lived in an archipelago in the South Pacific. One of the islands was Tanna, famous for being the home of a strange local cult dedicated to the worship of a Messiah they called “John Frum”.

The cult was invented by some groups of native Melanesians as a way of explaining the appliances, cars and heavy machines, and the planes that carried them, introduced to the islands by white invaders – especially American support troops during the Pacific War of 1941-45.

With no concept of how those products came into existence, the cult ascribed their presence to magic – pure and simple. Their former belief-system was abandoned as false (since it had failed to account for the machinery), and the villagers bent their minds to understanding how the magic worked.  If they could discover the trick, they could conjure up the products without the intervention of any foreigners.

When the Americans went away (promising to return, as Americans do) they left behind the fruits of their magic, which they had called “cargo”. The villagers tried to maintain the equipment, the way they had been taught. How hard could it be, after all?

They failed, and have ever since waited patiently for their man to return and disclose the magic formula. In 1972 the village we visited had a mock airstrip and a mock plane, and they met every so often to check whether John had snuck up on them overnight. As they learnt from the Christian missionaries, a few decades is not a long time to wait for the return of a Messiah.

© Gordon Barlow 2010. All rights reserved.