Days after the news of Prince Philip’s death, a young woman and her mother were selling Tanna at a market on the Vanuatu island, hearing it for the first time.
Sophie, who refused to give a family name, is visibly frightened as the information is registered. She quickly regained the reserved attitude that was so common on the island, but the news clearly touched her deeply.
“Sorry,” was all she said.
This simple statement was repeated over and over the island over the weekend. But Albi, the chief of the town Yakel, spoke it eloquently. “Lamopo, lamopo,” he said. I’m so, so sorry.
Albi receives a framed copy of the portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh released by Buckingham Palace. He held it motionless in his hands. No one spoke.
But his message to the queen is that she should not despair. Her husband’s spirit will live on.
The death of Prince Philip had a profound effect on the island of Tanna, in the small South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.
It is a popular misconception that the caste tribes of Tanna worship Prince Philip as a god. They do not. They honor him as one of their own. According to local belief, he was a man born on Tanna, and a great spirit lived in his body.
According to tradition, Philip left Tanna before World War II to seek his fortune. He traveled to the UK where he met, married and married the most powerful woman in the world.
Tanna kastom, they claim, came to live in the heart of the British Empire. A streak of this tribe to reconnect with Philip was documented on Channel 4’s Meet the Natives, in which a delegation of Tannan men travel to the UK to do the creator of the program reverse anthropology. In the last installment, they had a private meeting with Prince Philip.
Chief Lalu, from the west of Tanna, said: ‘Prince Philip was a man who connected Tanna with London. Our fathers and grandfathers told us this. ”
Prince Charles is, as they say, regarded as Man Tanna. “Prince Philip’s family is Tanna’s family,” he said.
Willie Lop is the highest rank on the island. He is equally unequivocal: “I want to tell the world that Prince Philip is from Tanna.”
‘I want to send the English nation a message of sympathy from the island of Tanna. We are sending this message to the Government and the people of England. We send our sympathy with the loss of Prince Philip. ”
Only a few kilometers from a newly constructed highway, the inhabitants of the town of Yakel deviate from all modernity, and live like thousands of years.
A short distance down on the curved, dusty roads lies Yaohnanen, which is considered the birthplace of the Prince Philip movement. There, Chief Jack Malia was more pragmatic about the loss of their spiritual leader.
“When the prince died,” he said, “it did not weigh us down, for the spirit that dwelt in him was here with us in the nakamal. He refers to the meeting place of the town, a broad sandy expanse sheltered under the branches of an old banyan tree.
“He was here with us,” he said.
The mourning in Vanuatu lasts 100 days. The whole island will observe the ritual, but Yaohnanen, the duke’s birthplace according to its inhabitants, remains the focus. Leaders of the surrounding villages are already gathering and conducting delicate negotiations to answer a question that lies at the heart of their living, ever-changing religion: Who will succeed Philip?
Malia says Prince Charles was anointed to his role during his visit to Vanuatu in 2018. Most people agree with him. But in Yakel, Albi is less sure. Prince Philip’s spirit lives on, he says, but it will take time before we know in whom to choose.
Every evening the men of the tribes of Prince Philip will gather to drink kava, a ceremonial drink with a slightly intoxicating effect, to listen to the wisdom it brings, and to remember the man who according to them leaves their island has to at the right hand of the Queen.