South Pacific Puzzle: Coping with Independence in Vanuatu

Welcome to “South Pacific Puzzle: Coping with Independence.”

Welcome to “South Pacific Puzzle: Coping with Independence.” My name is William Miles and I’m a political scientist at Northeastern University in Boston. In 1991, I spent seven months in the small island-nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific conducting research into language and politics. Why Vanuatu? ….. For several years now, I have been interested in Third World Countries that had once been colonies of France and in which people still speak French. How they differ from former British colonies of similar history and ethnicity has also intrigued me. Then — voilà — I discovered that there was one country that had simultaneously been a French and a British colony. They called it a condominium–on account of it being jointly ruled–and until independence in 1980 it went by the name of New Hebrides.