The Men Who Would Be King

Why do men dream of being worshiped by people on the other side of the world? world? It is an old fantasy, dating back to the first explorers when The imperial powers were looking greedily at the whole world. From the captain Cook to Hernan Cortes, they all came back with a particular story according to which they had been received as a god by the people they met in faraway lands. In Vanuatu, an archipelago in the South Pacific, the old dream is still alive and well. The Men Who Would Be King tells the stories of men from Europe and America who come to Vanuatu pretending or believing that they are the fulfillment of a prophecy on the islands that says that a divine man will one day come from overseas. These are tales as cunning as any fiction; the pretender to a tropical throne living in exile in Nice, the American filmmaker wandering between villages distributing necklaces of his own face. Sometimes they become violent: the old gunsmith who has led an armed insurrection in the jungle, the Las Vegas millionaires who have fashioned their own messiah in order to carve out their own paradise libertarian in the South Seas. The Men Who Would Be King is a series of encounters between 2014 and 2018 with the complex firmament of myths and oral traditions that crisscross Vanuatu, and the myriads of foreigners who settle there lose. The book asks why this dream of ancient explorers of men deified white people has endured in the Western imagination, through our films and our literature, and examines the long shadow it casts over our own era. Jon Tonks is a British photographer based in Bath, UK. His work focuses on long-term projects telling stories about lives shaped by history and geography. His work has been presented in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekend and the Sunday Times Magazine. He has has been nominated three times for the Taylor Wessing National Portrait Award. 2014 Tonks received the Royal Photographic Society's Vic Odden Award for her first book Empire: a journey across the South Atlantic to four British Remote Overseas Territories. Christopher Lord is a writer and editor. Previously based in the Middle East and Turkey for eight years, he writing about world affairs and contemporary art since 2008. The Men Who Would Be King is his first book.