John Frum Movement (Tanna Island, Vanuatu)

Last modified: 2004-09-10 by santiago dotor
Keywords: john frum | white sands | star (green) | stars: 5 (black) | star: 4 points (white) | stars: 4 | circumference (yellow) | canton (blue) | canton (brown) | canton (black) | stripes: 5 |
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by Jaume Ollé

• Description

See also:

• Nation of Tanna
• Tafea District (Vanuatu)
• Vanuatu

In an Australian report in TV around 1980 I saw the John Frum Movement flag: five horizontal stripes of red-green-red-green-red, blue square canton with the green star and yellow ring covering three stripes. A costumary flag -John Frum's- with allegiance to the Tanna Kingdom.

Jaume Ollé, 10 June 1998 and 30 January 1999

White Sands (Tanna) flag

by Thanh-Tâm Lê

Jaume Ollé's flag [vu}jfrum.gif] looks like the flag used today on the island by the villagers of White Sands, but instead of the "tanna" star in the canton, there are 5 black stars on a brown background arranged in saltire, the one in the middle being greater than the others.

Pascal Monney, 14 June 1998 and 1 February 1999

1940s Flag, wrongly captioned in Flags of Paradise 1996 as "John Frum - Gilbert Islands"

by Thanh-Tâm Lê

The Flags of Paradise 1996 chart has a flag of similar striped appearance, but with ca. 3:5 proportion and a large black canton with four 4-pointed "stars" placed in a square pattern. The flag is captioned: John Frum Flag - Gilbert Islands - 1940's.

Who is (was) this John Frum? Tanna and Kiribati are more than 2,000 km apart so I cannot imagine that "John Frum" ruled the two archipelagos. Is (was) he rather a kind of "Oceanian" Marcus Garvey, who would have inspired "liberation movements" througout the Pacific, his "colours" being used in different areas as flag basis? What do these "4-pointed stars" stand for? They also appear in the flag of the Epi District (Vanuatu). Are they really stars, or windroses, or something else?

Ivan Sache, 24 July 1999

There has been intensive anthropological research into cargo cults, escapist cults, where t