John Frum… Messiah

Tales of History and Imagination

This week we travel to Tana Island, Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides) in the midst of World War Two. God has returned - and not a moment too soon. Having abandoned them decades earlier, just as bad men with awful intentions arrived to steal their land - and send their people off to far away locales to be worked to death - he was back, as an American soldier named John Frum.

Sources Include:

This week a lot of articles (which I had saved in tabs - when my iPad crashed and needed a restore…This is as best I remember it.)

In John They Trust by Paul Raffaele
This explainer in the Guardian
This Guardian article by Christopher Lord
Archiving a Prophecy: An ethnographic history of the ‘John Frum files’ (Tanna, Vanuatu, 1941–1980) by Marc Tabani
This short piece on the NZ History site (that confirms my memory NZ too had blackbirded labour)
How Blackbirding Forced Tens of Thousands of Pacific Islanders into Slavery After the Civil War by Shoshi Parks
Blackbirding and Indentured Labour in 19th Century Queensland by Sue Thompson
From the Islands by Scott Hamilton (everyone should go and follow Scott on Twitter, if you’re still on there… I miss not seeing him in my feed, now I’ve X-ited)
Hunting the Blackbirder: Ross-Lewin and the Royal Navy by Doug Hunt

There were a handful more, including pages of old newspaper clippings on the Daphne Slave-ship bust, and a couple of articles specific to Blackbirding in Peru - I apologise for not backing these sources up somewhere as I went…

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