Anejom

The Anejom are the people of Aneityum, the southernmost inhabited island of Vanuatu. Their language of the same name is the island's only indigenous tongue, a Southern Vanuatu branch of the Oceanic group. Aneityum was settled around 874 BC by voyagers from Tanna, who first kept to coastal hillsides and later moved into the valleys.

Traditionally the island was ruled by chiefs called natimarid over chiefdoms named neclau; oral history tells of two original chiefdoms splitting into seven, then into fifty or sixty districts. The first European ship, the sandalwood brig Alpha, arrived in 1830, and the trade and epidemics that followed sharply reduced the Aneityumese population.