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On the main Fijian islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, communities were modernizing rapidly, but on the outlying ones where the yavusa lived, people practiced a subsistence lifestyle that had changed little in generations. Hints of the current era had surfaced among the tribe's 400 members—a few carried cell phones, some had jobs at a lumber mill on Vanua Levu—but most lived in huts with no electricity or indoor plumbing and survived by catching fish, growing cassava, and collecting rainwater.
Tui Mali, seeking jobs and income for his people, had decided to develop Vorovoro, the gem of his fiefdom, which was uninhabited save for the chief and a few relatives. (Everyone else resided on Mali, an island immediately to the east, or in a village on Vanua Levu.) In February 2006, with the help of a tech-savvy nephew, Tui Mali listed Vorovoro's availability on the Web, and less than a month later, he heard from Keene and James.
Charging flights on their credit cards, the Brits went to Fiji, where they soon learned that negotiations would involve more than a quick meeting and some paperwork. They hiked all over Vorovoro, conferred with the Native Land Trust Board (NLTB), and sat outdoors for dozens of hours drinking grog, a narcotic brew made from the kava plant. Most of all, they discussed the project with Tui Mali and his relatives. After five days, Keene and James reached an agreement with the chief and the NLTB: Tribewanted would pay $53,000 for a three-year lease and $26,500 in donations to the community; jobs were promised as well. Tribewanted's small staff earned only modest salaries and the tourist facilities the tribe built would ultimately belong to the Fijians. "We are all excited about Tribewanted," Tui Mali told a local newspaper reporter. "It will provide us with work for the next three years."
Tui Mali led the First Footers into a large clearing behind the beach and sat on the ground with his legs crossed. More than a hundred of the yavusa, dressed traditionally in palm-frond skirts and colorful bula shirts, gathered before him with the new tribe members. Gazing at the motley assembly, Tui Mali recalled how Keene had originally explained that an "online community" was similar—well, sort of—to the yavusa; both were networks of interconnected people. "The only difference is that our tribe is global and we communicate virtually as opposed to getting on a boat and going to the next village," Keene had said.
The young man knelt before Tui Mali now. With his freckles and reddish hair, Ben Keene could have been a Boy Scout at his Eagle Court, but, as of today, he was "Chief Bengazi." The new chief read a short statement in Fijian and extended his hands. Dangling from them on a length of cord was the most sacred of all traditional offerings: a tabua, or whale tooth. "I hope that you accept us into your community," Bengazi said.
Tui Mali's reasons for saying yes weren't purely financial. Though he had long wanted to attract tourists to Vorovoro, he wasn't interested in having a massive resort occupy the island. Moreover, he believed that Keene and James would respect his culture and kin. In August, a representative for the reality-TV show Survivor had come to Tui Mali to discuss using Vorovoro, but the chief turned him down, a decision that was principled but costly: Survivor reportedly found a location on Vanua Levu and promised a payout that made Tribewanted's look like loose change—$3.5 million, per the Fiji Times, in jobs and local spending.
Tui Mali accepted the whale tooth and gave a short speech. Normally there is a line in the sand, he said, with tourists on one side and Fijians on the other, but not on Vorovoro. "From today forward we are one tribe," he said.
With that, the meke began. Shirtless men with painted faces chanted and clacked sticks rhythmically as women in turquoise skirts and leafy necklaces danced in long, swaying lines. The chief could smell the lovo, a traditional feast of roast pig, turtle, and fish, slow-cooking in an underground oven, and somebody passed him his first bowl of grog. Then everybody in the clearing, the yavusa and the First Footers alike, linked arms, formed a giant circle, and cheered.
The plan on Vorovoro was to create a sort of Ewok Eden: a discreet complex of traditional-style huts that blended in under the palms, consumed a minimum of natural resources, and relied, where possible, on nonpolluting technologies such as solar power. Crops would be planted in the small valley behind the village, and protein would come largely from fresh fish caught in local waters by the yavusa.
On September 2 the festive ceremonial ground in the seaside clearing had become a cluttered construction site; nails, scraps of wood, and tools were everywhere. Two of the tribe's younger members—Ryan Smith, 23, a toolmaker and avid backpacker from Crestline, California, and Raina Jensen, 23, who had just graduated from college in Vermont—hauled logs up from the beach with the Fijians. Tui Mali used a tape measure to gauge the dimensions for the great bure, an open-sided, thatched-roof structure that had been approved—by a 96 percent "yes" vote online—as the new tribe's central meeting place. Dixie Tanner, a 44-year-old reflexologist and the British version of a Sedona New Ager, and 24-year-old Becky Hunter, until recently a British soap opera star and now on staff as a Tribal TV presenter, both worked with Epeli. The elderly Fijian man was showing them how to weave palm fronds into walls for an outdoor shower.
Into this scene calmly strode a tall man in a sweat-stained red shirt and a tan bush hat. He puffed at the soggy stub of a hand-rolled cigarette; smiled frequently, showing small, crooked teeth; and delivered orders to workers with the raspy voice of a late-night deejay: "Right, so you'll get some sacks for the recycling…. We'll need to rip up leaves and throw them in the composting bins…. There's a little broken glass on the beach that somebody can pick up."
Warren Wright was a chief. The tribe would elect a different leader each month to serve alongside Keene and Tui Mali, and Wright had won the first election. A 45-year-old from Cornwall, England, he had drifted between jobs—construction, catering, sales—before finding that he could make his living by playing poker online, earning him his nickname, "Poques." He routinely won thousands of dollars in tournaments and once snagged a $12,000 prize. Divorced, he had left his only daughter in the care of her mother. With neither office job nor family to hold him back, Poques wanted to stay for years, not weeks, on Vorovoro, and planned to remake himself, by ditching vices such as smoking and drinking and accomplishing something meaningful. "I represent many people from around the world joined together to live in harmony with each other and the environment," he told Tui Mali at the opening ceremony.
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