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Happy John Frum Day. February 15 is approaching and that is the day this odd little holiday is celebrated. Who and where in the world is John Frum? Those are the questions that have been asked for the past 60 plus years on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, an island chain near Australia, by a "cargo cult" called the John Frum Movement.

Vanuatu was known as New Hebrides before World War II. Many think it was here, not New Guinea, where the legend of the headhunting cannibals originated. Of course, that might have something to do with the locals' habit of eating their enemies and the occasional missionary before they were "civilized" by the French and British in the late 1800's. The Tanna islanders always believed the Creator had come from the volcano, Yasur, on their island. When the Europeans came, they tried to convert the natives to Christianity. The Christians banned local "kastoms" like polygamy, chewing kava - the "drug of choice" in that part of the world - and working or dancing on Sunday. Though many of the locals converted, a large number were having no parts of it and took off to the mountains.

One legend has it that in the 1930's, a native by the name of Manehivi started telling the locals that if they continued to follow the "old" ways and ignored the Christian churches, they would have untold fortunes and prosperity handed to them. He told them to stop going to church, throw away all their money, stop going to work everything would be provided to the faithful. He took the name John Frum, derived from John the Baptist who was known in island pidgin as John from Jesus.

Another tale claims that the movement started when some of the locals were hired in the 1930's by American contractors to build a small airport. The boss was John from America and had brought some amazing items with him that they had never seen before.

In 1941, the Movement did stop working in their gardens, killed all their pigs and threw away their money. They started partying fulltime singing, dancing on Sunday, chewing kava, polygamizing - waiting for John to show up from somewhere. They just knew that soon their prayers would be answered and "John" would provide all their material needs. And, being the true believers they were, it wasn't long before great and wondrous "things" literally started dropping from the sky. And these incredible things from John were called "Cargo."

Of course, that was the same time the American military arrived and started building forward bases and air fields

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