Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands are a nation of atolls in the central Pacific, laid out in two long parallel chains. The country has more than a thousand islets grouped into some thirty atolls, scattered over a vast stretch of ocean. About 42,000 people live there; the capital is Majuro. A people of navigators among the most skilled in the Pacific, the Marshallese also carry a deep wound: their atolls of Bikini and Enewetak were the site, in the mid-20th century, of American nuclear tests of enormous power, whose effects are still felt in a country that remains closely tied to the United States.

The Marshall Islands consist entirely of low coral atolls and islets around wide lagoons. Kwajalein atoll has one of the largest lagoons in the world. Like their neighbours, the islands are very low and therefore highly threatened by rising seas. They also bear a unique scar: at Bikini, the lagoon floor holds the wrecks of the fleet sunk during the tests and the crater left by the "Bravo" shot, while at Enewetak a concrete dome covers radioactive waste.

Settled about two thousand years ago by Austronesian seafarers, the Marshall Islands developed a clan society led by chiefs (iroij) and an exceptional art of navigation. After Spanish, German and then Japanese rule, they were placed under American trusteeship after the Second World War and chosen for nuclear testing: between 1946 and 1958 the United States set off sixty-seven bombs there, including the most powerful it ever tested, displacing whole communities and contaminating several atolls for the long term. The country became independent in 1986, in free association with the United States, and still bears this heavy legacy.

People speak Marshallese, an Oceanic Austronesian language, alongside English, which is also official. The country is overwhelmingly Christian, mostly Protestant since the missionaries came, and the church is central to community life. This faith sits alongside respect for clans and chiefs, and the legacy of a traditionally matrilineal society, in which land and rank pass through women, a principle that still holds.

Marshallese culture is that of a sea people and master navigators. Its best-known object is the stick chart (such as the rebbelib): a frame of sticks and shells that shows ocean swells and how they bend and break around islands. It was used to learn how to travel between atolls by reading the sea. There is also fine pandanus-leaf weaving, famous across the Pacific, along with songs and dances. Life revolves around the lagoon, fishing, breadfruit, taro and coconut.