Spiritual succession: Vanuatu tribe who worshipped Prince Philip as a god will now deify Charles

A tribe in the South Pacific that worshipped the Duke of Edinburgh as a living god will likely transfer their allegiance to Prince Charles, a leading anthropologist has said.

The Duke has for decades been worshipped as a spirit or god by a group of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, formerly an Anglo-French colony known as the New Hebrides.

They would be deeply saddened by his passing and are set to respond to his death with ritual wailing, ceremonial dancing and the drinking of a mildly narcotic drink called kava, said Kirk Huffman, an authority on what is known as the Prince Philip Movement.

“I imagine there will be some ritual wailing, some special dances. There will be a focus on the men drinking kava – it is the key to opening the door to the intangible world. On Tanna it is not drunk as a means of getting drunk. It connects the material world with the non-material world,” said Cambridge-educated Mr Huffman, the honorary curator of Vanuatu’s national museum.

A muddy-looking liquid drunk from coconut shells or plastic bowls, kava is a mixture of water and the crushed roots of the kava plant, which grows throughout the South Pacific. Drinking it produces a feeling of mild euphoria and numbs the mouth and tongue.

Prince Charles visited Vanuatu in 2018 on a trip to the Pacific. He was given a grass skirt and a garland and was appointed an honorary chief. He drank kava and met some of the tribal leaders of Tanna.

One of them took back to the island the coconut shell from which the Prince of Wales had drunk.

“He told me he would build a shrine to it, almost as if it was a holy grail,” Mr Huffman told the Telegraph. “So a connection was made between Tanna and Charles. I suspect the beliefs of the islanders will continue with Prince Charles.”

The worship of Prince Philip as a god is a result of the melding of traditional customary beliefs – known in pidgin English as kastom – with some of the tenets of Christianity, including the idea of the Second Coming of Christ, which the Tannese learned from missionaries.

Their veneration of the prince fitted comfortably with an ancient prophecy that a man from Tanna would venture far away in search of a powerful woman to marry.

The Duke's cult-like status received a boost when he paid a state visit to the New Hebrides, as it was then known, in 1974.

Tribal chief Jack Naiva paddled a canoe out to greet the royal yacht. "I saw him standing on the deck in his white uniform," he was quoted as saying. "I knew then he was the true messiah."

His special status in the eyes of the people of Tanna continued after Vanuatu was granted independence by Britain and France in 1980. The movement is centred on the villages of Yakel and Yaohnanen.

“They believe that Philip is the current form of a god or spirit originally linked to a sacred mountain on Tanna,” said Mr Huffman, who is originally from the West Country and first explored Vanuatu in 1973.

“He left the island ages ago to go overseas, to find a wife, and he found the Queen of England. One story was that once his rule had encircled the globe, with the Queen as his consort, he would promote kastom and peace.

“They explain his light skin with a story that says he rolled on a coral reef and it shredded off his black skin and left him white.”

In 2007, Channel 4 arranged for a delegation of five islanders to meet Prince Philip at Windsor Castle for a documentary called 'Meet the Natives'. There was trepidation in anthropological circles that a slip of the tongue on the Duke's part could shake the religion to its core. But the meeting, if a touch awkward, was hailed as a success with one of the islanders, Jimmy Joseph, saying "because we believe that he is the son of our god, meeting him is just wonderful".

The worship of the Duke is classed as a visionary movement and is a complex response by islanders to the huge changes to their way of life brought by colonialism and Christianity.

It is different to the cargo cults that developed in other parts of Melanesia after islanders saw the extraordinary material wealth brought first by colonialism and then by Allied forces in the Second World War.

They developed the belief that the “cargo” or material goods could be tempted back by hacking rudimentary landing strips out of the jungle or building wharves on the coast.

One of the few cargo cults to have survived is found on Tanna – the John Frum movement.

Adherents dress up in home-made US army uniforms, drill with bamboo rifles and parade beneath the Stars and Stripes in the hope of enticing the kind of “cargo” – food, vehicles, medicine - that the US military brought during the war.