John Frum Movement (Tanna Island, Vanuatu)

Last modified: 2001-09-28 by santiago dotor
Keywords: vanuatu | john frum | white sands | star (green) | stars: 5 (black) | star: 4 points (white) | stars: 4 | circumference (yellow) | canton (blue) | canton (brown) | canton (black) | stripes: 5 |
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by Jaume Ollé

• Description

See also:

• Nation of Tanna
• Tafea District (Vanuatu)
• Vanuatu

In an Australian report in TV around 1980 I saw the John Frum Movement flag: five horizontal stripes of red-green-red-green-red, blue square canton with the green star and yellow ring covering three stripes. A costumary flag -John Frum's- with allegiance to the Tanna Kingdom.

Jaume Ollé, 10 June 1998 and 30 January 1999

White Sands (Tanna) flag

by Thanh-Tâm Lê

Jaume Ollé's flag [vu}jfrum.gif] looks like the flag used today on the island by the villagers of White Sands, but instead of the "tanna" star in the canton, there are 5 black stars on a brown background arranged in saltire, the one in the middle being greater than the others.

Pascal Monney, 14 June 1998 and 1 February 1999

1940s Flag, wrongly captioned in Flags of Paradise 1996 as "John Frum - Gilbert Islands"

by Thanh-Tâm Lê

The Flags of Paradise 1996 chart has a flag of similar striped appearance, but with ca. 3:5 proportion and a large black canton with four 4-pointed "stars" placed in a square pattern. The flag is captioned: John Frum Flag - Gilbert Islands - 1940's.

Who is (was) this John Frum? Tanna and Kiribati are more than 2,000 km apart so I cannot imagine that "John Frum" ruled the two archipelagos. Is (was) he rather a kind of "Oceanian" Marcus Garvey, who would have inspired "liberation movements" througout the Pacific, his "colours" being used in different areas as flag basis? What do these "4-pointed stars" stand for? They also appear in the flag of the Epi District (Vanuatu). Are they really stars, or windroses, or something else?

Ivan Sache, 24 July 1999

There has been intensive anthropological research into cargo cults, escapist cults, where the leaders promised their followers that a great bird would carry a world of goods if they followed certain rituals. These cults were in the late 1930's rather isolated. It spread like wildfire when the villagers from a village in Malaita (Solomon Islands), who had fled to the woods, got back to their village to find out the colonial oppressors had left and a huge bird was standing near the village filled with all the goods of the world. It was an American transport plane, which mysteriously had been left by the crew, but the word spread. In Tanna the Americans built a huge town and then the war was over, so they left it to the villagers. It seems that one of the villagers asked an American who they were. The answer, "John from America", which the villagers translated into John Frum. The phenomenon of cargo cults was observed from the Dutch East Indies to French Polynesia, and was alternatively called John Frum movement. A rather universal emblem was the Red Cross, as many goods were from Red Cross relief. Perhaps the star is the symbol of the origin of the bird: the stars, but I'm sure Jaume Ollé will know that!

Jarig Bakker, 24 July 1999

According to Ralph Bartlett (Flag Society of Australia secretary), this flag (No 124 on the Flags of Paradise 1996 chart) was sourced from a (partly hidden) colour photograph in a book called Pacifica Myth, Magic and Traditional Wisdom from the South Sea Islands, Angus & Robertson 1993, page 107. John Frum lived on the island of Tanna during World War Two. Ralph accidentally labelled the flag as coming fom the Gilbert Islands (nowadays Kiribati) on the chart.

Nozomi Kariyasu, 28 August 1999