Prince Philip with Queen Elizabeth: treated like a god in Vanuatu
A tribe in Vanuatu was shocked and dismayed to discover today that
Prince Philip, who they pray to as the son of an ancestral local
mountain god will likely never return to their Pacific Island home.
Buckingham Palace announced Thursday that the 95 year old man would
no longer take part in public engagements, alone or alongside his wife,
Queen Elizabeth II.
Amazingly for decades, he has been part of the fabric of life in
the village of Younanen on Tanna Island. The cult of worshippers is
known as Prince Philip Movement.
Villagers pray to the prince daily, asking for his blessing on the
banana and yam crops that make their primitive and extremely poor
community self-sufficient.
“If he comes one day the people will not be poor, there will be no sickness, no debt and the garden will be growing very well,”
village chief Jack Malia told Reuters through an interpreter at the
village’s Nakamal, a traditional meeting place where the men gather at
night to drink highly intoxicating kava.
Villagers have several photos of the prince, including one dated
1980 of him in a suit, holding a club they made for him and sent to
London.
“Prince Philip has said one day he will come and visit us,” said Malia, who was born in 1964 but did not know his birthday. “We still believe that he will come but if he doesn’t come, the pictures that I am holding… it means nothing.”
According to local legend, the pale-skinned son of the mountain god
had ventured across the seas to look for a rich and powerful woman to
marry.
Anthropologists believe Philip, who fitted the bill by marrying a
powerful woman, became linked to the legend in the 1960s when Vanuatu
was an Anglo-French colony known as the New Hebrides. Villagers at the
time were likely to have seen portraits of Philip and the Queen at
government offices and police stations run by colonial officials.
The belief that Philip, also known as the Duke of Edinburgh, was
indeed the traveling son was reinforced in 1974 when he and the Queen
made an official visit to the New Hebrides.
“Prince Philip is important to us because our ancestors told us that part of our custom is in England,” said Malia, who took over from his father as village chief in 2003.
Younanen is not marked on maps. Finding it requires a local guide
and a three-hour drive through dirt trails from Lenakel, the capital of
Tanna, itself little more than a shed and a shop.
Children play naked, some of the women wear traditional grass
skirts with bare chests while the men, clothed in old t-shirts, carry
machetes.
Asked whether Philip’s blessings would help with the tropical
storms that often batter Vanuatu, like the Category 4 Cyclone Donna
currently passing over the archipelago’s north, Malia said that wasn’t
generally in his remit as they generally flowed up from the south.
Malia added that Philip had told villagers not to ever take money
from people who visited, but that they should accept food, like rice, to
share among themselves.
There is some irony in Philip, who has been by the queen’s side
throughout her 65 years on the throne, being considered a god by a
primitive community thousands of miles away from London’s civilization.
His reputation for making politically incorrect gaffes has been
partly earned by comments about foreigners. He once advised British
students not to stay too long in China for fear of becoming
“slitty-eyed”.
And on a trip to Australia, he asked a group of shocked Aborigines if they still threw spears at each other.
-Reuters
No comments:
Post a Comment