Vanuatu is an archipelago of 83 islands in the southwestern Pacific, running roughly north-south for about 1,300 kilometers. It uses UTC+11, year-round, no daylight saving.

The country was known as the New Hebrides until independence in 1980. During the colonial period it was jointly administered by France and Britain under an arrangement that was so administratively absurd it earned a nickname: the Condominium. Not a residential building. An arrangement where two colonial powers ran parallel administrations, courts, police forces, and systems simultaneously, in the same territory, and neither trusted the other to handle anything alone.

The Condominium: two clocks, two courts, two everything

Under the Anglo-French New Hebrides Condominium (1906-1980), the territory had two sets of courts, one French and one British, for disputes involving French or British nationals, and a joint court for everything else. There were two separate police forces, two hospitals in some areas, two school systems in different languages, and in effect two administrative calendars.

Which clock did you use? That depended on which colonial system you were interacting with at the moment. French administrators in Port Vila used French colonial time preferences. British administrators used British ones.

When Vanuatu became independent on July 30, 1980, the new government chose UTC+11, which aligned the country with the Solomon Islands to the north and Australia’s AEDT (though Australia shifts seasonally while Vanuatu does not). The choice unified a clock that had effectively been split for 74 years.

80 languages, one timezone

Vanuatu has a population of roughly 330,000 people and approximately 80 to 110 distinct indigenous languages. This makes it one of the most linguistically dense places on Earth relative to population. Each island, and in some cases each valley on a given island, has its own language.

The lingua franca is Bislama, a creole language derived from 18th and 19th century English-based Pacific Pidgin. Bislama is how speakers of different Vanuatu languages talk to each other.

The concept of time in Vanuatu’s indigenous communities is not anchored to UTC+11. Seasonal gardens, yam cycles, the appearance of certain fish, the blooming of particular plants, these are the natural calendars that govern subsistence life on the outer islands. The civil timezone governs government offices in Port Vila and flights at Bauerfield International Airport.

Kava and the evening’s own clock

Vanuatu is the origin of kava culture, the ceremonial and social use of the plant Piper methysticum. Nakamals, kava bars, open across Vanuatu as the sun goes down. The ritual is significant: kava is prepared and consumed according to custom and the social logic of the nakamal, not according to clock time.

In Port Vila’s nakamals, the evening begins at dusk. People arrive, drink kava in cups passed clockwise (in many nakamals), speak quietly, and depart gradually as the evening deepens. The kava schedule operates by sunset, roughly 6 PM throughout the year at Vanuatu’s latitude, not by the clock on the wall.

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