Apma

The Apma are an Oceanic-speaking Melanesian people of the mountainous centre of Pentecost island in Vanuatu, whose speech, also called Abma or Central Raga, stands between the North Vanuatu and Central Vanuatu language groups.

They live in garden villages where taro is the staple and pigs serve as wealth and as ceremonial payment in marriage and compensation. Society is ordered by grade-taking, rank rising through the ritual slaughter of valued pigs, and Pentecost's famous land diving belongs to the same complex: each year men hurl themselves from wooden towers twenty to thirty metres high with vines on their ankles, an offering to secure the yam harvest and mark manhood.

Spanish ships first sighted Pentecost in April 1606, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached it on the day of Pentecost in 1768 and gave the island its name.