(4 May 2017) LEAD-IN:
Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, will stop carrying out public engagements after August, Buckingham Palace has announced.
On the other side of the world, a group of island villagers worship the 95-year-old prince like a god and believe his spirit will never die.
STORYLINE:
Villagers here have been performing traditional dances like this for generations.
But there's one aspect of their culture that they've adopted more recently.
They worship Prince Philip - the husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.
The former naval officer is known in the UK as a sports enthusiast who's a bit cantankerous at times and prone to saying the wrong thing.
But to several hundred people living in a handful of remote villages on Tanna Island in the tropical Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, the Duke of Edinburgh is much more.
"Here in Tanna, we believe that Prince Philip is the son of our god, our ancestral god, who lives up in the mountain," explains Yakel villager Nako Nikien, who prefers to go by the name Jimmy Joseph.
Standing under his sacred banyan tree, another villager from Yakel - named Albi Nagia - sings as he cracks open a coconut with a few strikes of his bush machete.
He chews the flesh inside and spits it out, to the delight of gathering chickens.
He's offering a daily prayer to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Joseph says it's become a tradition to pray to Philip each evening, when villagers from Yaohnanen and Yakel gather in their meeting places and share an intoxicating brew made from kava plants.
"We ask him for the... to increase the production of our crops in the garden, or to give us the sun, or rain. And it happens," he says.
Those prayers became more pressing after Cyclone Pam ripped through Tanna in March 2015, killing at least five on the island of 30,000 and destroying homes and crops.
Both Nagia and Joseph are members of the Prince Philip movement, an unusual cult that developed in a place where people still choose to live as they have for centuries.
Their homes are simple thatch huts and they wear nothing but grass skirts or a penis shield called a 'nambas.'
Known as kastom, it's a traditional way of life that villagers say is under threat from the spread of western civilisation.
When the villagers make the trek to the island's main town to sell coffee beans or buy rice, they usually put on clothes.
In 2007, Nagia and Joseph were among five locals who were flown to England by a British reality show, "Meet the Natives."
The five met Philip privately at Windsor Castle.
"Yeah it was like, you know, because we believe that he is the son of our god, and meeting him, meeting him is just wonderful," says Joseph.
"It's just like being in a place where, or like being in a spiritual world. You know, in 2007, it was the 19th March when I met him in Windsor Castle, which is in northwest of London city."
It's unclear how the movement began.
It appears to have grown in the 1960s as an offshoot or rival to another unusual island movement, the John Frum cargo cult.
That cult began around the 1930s and got a boost when US servicemen were posted to Vanuatu during World War II.
Followers believe the mysterious John Frum will one day return from afar and bring spiritual and material wealth.
Joseph says the John Frum movement grew at a difficult time, as elders tried to cling to traditional beliefs and prophecies, but were mocked and imprisoned for them as Christianity took hold.
Elders later sent Philip a club from Tanna, and he sent them back a photograph showing him holding it.
"The movement will always continue," says Joseph.
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