Wedding

Luckily there are also happy occasions to attend. Marie, the cleaner of the Malampa guesthouse and one of my colleagues, bought a wife for her second son yesterday. In Bislama: pem woman. This is a 'kastom' ritual. Kastom means traditional. It is not always clear to what period of traditions kastom refers back to. Sometimes it means from before missionaries arrived and everybody was happily running around naked while eating the occasional white man, sometimes it refers to the time when everybody got into their best island dress or shirt on Sunday to listen to the Christian white man. Quite often too it is simply a conversation stopper, meaning: "This is just the way we do things! Kastom!"
To get married in Vanuatu most people still use this old ritual from the time when the price of a wife was determined in pigs. Nowadays most of the time the price is set in Vatu. A couple of years ago the highest Council of Chiefs of Vanuatu fixed the price of one woman at 80.000 Vatu. Or to put in another way: for the price of two televisions you get a lifetime of domestic service. Not a bad deal. At least, for half of the parties involved.

Anyway, Marie asked me to come and take pictures of the event, and ofcourse I was more than happy to oblige. (As said earlier in another context: I am available for weddings and funerals (23 January). Little did I know that it would turn out like this)



You can see the woman to be bought sitting on the mat in a green dress with her auntie next to her. As with last week's funeral, everyone who could attended the event. Before the ceremony 10 stakes were put in the ground. In the old days the pigs would have been fixed to these. In some communities it still works like this, but Marie is part of the Seventh Day Adventist Church - quite a big church in Vanuatu - whose members are not allowed to eat pigs. So instead a big wad of 10.000 Vatu was attached to the top of each of the stakes. In the front you see two big piles of other kastom currencies that were thrown into the bargain; mats, yams and bananas. The ceremony itself was quite simple: one by one the wads of cash were taken of the stakes and handed over to the girls family, followed by the mats, yams and bananas. After this the boy's family was allowed to escort the girl to her new house in their village.
It all sounds like a very technical proces, not romantic at all, and in a sense it is. The evening before heavy negotiations had been going on between Marie's family and the girl's until agreement was finally reached at 100.000 Vatu. 20.000 more than the guideline set by the Council of Chiefs. The reason for this was that the girl had left her village at her own accord at least a year ago, because she wanted to go and live with her boyfriend. For this Marie's family got 'fined' 20.000 Vatu. Romance after all.