Vanuatu is a Melanesian nation of some eighty islands in the southwestern Pacific, home to more than a hundred indigenous languages among only a few hundred thousand people, which makes it among the most linguistically dense places on earth. Settled by Lapita voyagers about three thousand years ago, it was governed until 1980 by a joint British and French administration, the Anglo-French Condominium, before becoming independent as the Republic of Vanuatu. It remains a place where local custom, called kastom, and a shared national life are still being fitted together.
For seventy-four years, two European empires governed these islands at once, and neither would yield to the other. Britain and France ran parallel police forces, parallel hospitals, parallel schools, and parallel prisons. Their nationals answered to separate courts, spent different money, and lived under two sets of law. The joint court that handled everything else needed a neutral judge, so its presiding role was filled on the nomination of the King of Spain. Settlers called the arrangement not a Condominium but a "Pandemonium." When independence came in 1980, a single nation had to be built from a colony that had never quite been one thing.