Thomas Booth - The South Pacific Islands of Vanuatu

Next in importance after Port Vila is the town of Luganville, called Santo, a town of 5,500 on the south coast of the biggest island in the group, Espiritu Santo. Here and nearby 125,000 Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders were stationed during World War II. It was a staging area for the Pacific campaign, and it was from several airfields near Luganville that bombers conducted raids on Japanese-held islands.

Evidence of those days lingers, there are Quonset huts still in use as warehouses, some overgrown air raid shelters, and all over the island you'll see lengths of the meshwork steel once used to surface the runways of hastily built airstrips. It's used now for fences, walkways and small bridges.

Copra, some fish processing, and cattle keep Luganville going, but only just, for life there looks somnolent. Except for the divers who come to explore "Million Dollar Point;' and the wreck of the President Coolidge, there are few tourists. Except for this southwest corner of 75-mile-long, 45-mile-wide Espiritu Santo, the island is one of mountainous jungle and life, for the tribespeople in the interior is much the same as it's always been.

It was on Espiritu Santo that the pre-independence comic opera occurred, events that escalated into what is now called the Coconut War. Roughly this is what happened.
Life for the French and British under the pre-independence Condominium had been confusing enough, but they were badly alarmed when Father Lini became head of the Independence Party circa 1979 and said that after independence foreign-held land would be returned to the indigenous people.

Enter at this point Jimmy Stevens, a bearded nonconformist who was part-English and part-islander and who lived on Espiritu Santo. Jimmy had at one time felt that the black man should have the land the white man had taken from him. He'd even urged his people to go and squat on French-owned land, which they did, and for which Jimmy was thrown in jail. Released, he continued his protest and was in trouble once more. But by now he was an established martyr.
A strange thing happened though, for Jimmy changed his point of view and began to support the efforts of a group of Americans to buy land on Espiritu Santo. The Americans were planning to buy lots that could eventually be used for retirement or holiday purposes. But that ended badly because when officials in Vila heard about this, they became fearful of an American colony in their backyard, and instituted new regulations and taxes. Most Americans pulled out. The French landowners, however, saw possibilities of staying on after independence. Jimmy Stevens not only said this was possible, but he drew up a separate constitution for Espiritu Santo, called the country Vemarana, and declared himself head of the new state.