Ben Keene was sitting at his laptop at home in Devon when he received an
e-mail from a friend, Mark Bowness. It read: “A tribe is wanted.”
The challenge was this: to establish an eco-community on a South Sea island
that would be created and controlled over the internet. Within weeks they
had launched Tribewanted.com, calling for 5,000 people to join an online
tribe that would establish a real-life democracy on Vorovoro, a
palm-fringed, coconut-groved idyll 25 minutes by boat from Fiji’s main
island.
For a membership fee of between £120 and £360 potential tribe members could
buy the right to live on Vorovoro for a few weeks each year and help build a
village. All the decisions – from whom to elect as monthly chief to whether
to build a treehouse – would be organised and voted for online by the rest
of the “tribe”.
“The internet is the most powerful way to connect like-minded people,” says
Keene, 28. “We’re tapping into the trend for social networks that allows
decisions to be made collectively by people all over the world.” In fact
they had tapped into every man’s dream of living in paradise. When The
Sunday Times first publicised Tribewanted in April 2006, the response was
immediate.
“We were on Good Morning America; there were film crews in my back garden,”
Keene recalls. “I was invited on BBC Radio 2 and I got a call from a guy who
had pulled off the motorway just to say, ‘I don’t want to miss my chance to
be part of this’.”
The tribe quickly amassed 700 members from 35 countries, so Keene headed out
to Vorovoro.
“I was thinking, business is easy.” But as he was about to discover, creating
utopia would be anything but.
With just four days to go till the first 15 members arrived, there was no
sanitation, no facilities, no power; just 200 acres of undergrowth set in
crystal water.
No work could start until he presented a whale’s tooth to the landowner in
return for timber. Two days, and sleepless nights, later he found one at a
market. He admits that by then he was feeling “physically sick” with
anxiety. “When you create a business on an island,” he says, “there is a
capitalist framework that you have to use and then you’ve got these ancient
traditions and ideals of community living and there are moments when the
jigsaw pieces don’t quite fit.”
Since then he has had to contend with a bushfire, a military coup, a number of
cyclones and the threat of bankruptcy.
Tribewanted has turned out to be an ambitious mixture of online networking –
the trend popularised by sites such as Face-book and MySpace – and socially
responsible adventure travel, or “volun-tourism”. But in some ways it was a
natural progression for Keene, a politics graduate who had worked for a
gap-year project company on programmes in places from Tim-buktu to Kenya.
Its members are predominantly from the US and Britain and aged between 18 and
35, but they have had a 60-year-old yoga teacher and a Hawaiian spearfishing
instructor on the island. Some people come for escapism; others are
fascinated by the idea of building paradise. Will, 19, a student from
Worces-tershire, is under no illusions: “I’m escaping from responsibility.”
For John, 57, an engineer from west London, it’s about the “cultural
exchange”.
Stuart “Kimbo” Kimberly, 26, an office worker from Leaming-ton Spa, had never
travelled outside Europe. “Perhaps I was too judgmental before, but meeting
these people from different cultures has changed my outlook and possibly the
way my life is going.”
The island has been leased for three years from the chief of the neighbouring
island, Mali. Chief Tui Mali welcomes all visitors to Vorovoro with a
traditional kava ceremony – a coconut cup full of a mildly narcotic greyish
liquid – as a gesture of friendship.
But the island has never attracted as many tribe members as Keene hoped – even
as the first composting toilets were built and trees felled, Tribewanted was
in crisis.
An American blog, The Jem Report, posted a message claiming that Bowness, 27,
was a “text-book conman”. He had dreamt up internet start-ups before that
had not worked. Although everything was legitimate, there was a feeding
frenzy on the web, with the two entrepreneurs accused of trying to work a
scam.
“It should have been painfully obvious that we’re not,” Keene says. “I’d put
my face in national papers on both sides of the Atlantic. Who’s going to run
away from that?” But the subscriptions stopped.
The initial funds had been used to lease the island for £49,000 and set up the
website. They urgently needed 10,000 gallons of drinking water as well as
power and facilities. They were hoping for 100 people on the island each
week; they were averaging 20.
To keep the project afloat, Keene borrowed money from family and friends and
took out a bank loan of £30,000. Bowness, unable to raise private funds,
bowed out.
“Mark couldn’t invest so I would have taken all the financial risk and yet he
would have retained ownership. It’s one of the horrible things about running
a business, especially for a project like this which is all about community
ideals. There are a lot of important values in it and you’re suddenly placed
in a situation where you feel like a bastard. We worked it out, but it was a
hard time.” If anything, the travails of the digital tribe go only to show
the importance of human networks. The project is wholly dependent on
cooperation with the local Fijians – Varita, the head cook, Tevita, a
horticulturalist, and Ulai, the chief’s nephew.
“Everyone is paid,” Keene says. “We spend an average of $22,000 Fijian dollars
[£7,000]a month in the local economy. We hire boats from the local villages
instead of buying our own to create income; we’ve employed more than 150
people.”
Together the two tribes – Fijian and internet – have builta 50ft Fijian
longhouse, staff quarters, an open dorm, family huts, two bucket showers
that run into a reed bed so the water is recycled and used on the garden,
water tanks, a treehouse and even a tiny football pitch.
The next task is to make the island sustainable. They have a partnership with
Ecotricity, which has provided wind turbines. “We were so excited that we
could plug in our phones and power up our laptops, and the Fijians said,
‘Don’t you want to put up some lights?’ ” Keene says. Most of the food is
grown or reared on the island and they have started to create biogas.
They now have a sustainabil-ity manager, Duncan – who proposed to his
girlfriend Julia on Vorovoro on Christmas Day with, of course, a whale’s
tooth. There have been four other engagements, all couples who met through
Tribewanted.
Despite the catalogue of disasters – after the bloodless coup in December 2006
the Foreign Office advised against travel to Fiji – it is the introduction
of jobs and alcohol that has been hardest to manage.
“Kava is important but apart from that [the Malians] are a conservative
Christian community, and although people might come here and want a beer
around the campfire we have to be really careful,” Keene says.
There was a serious conflict of authority when two Fijian boys stole beer from
the group. Keene wanted to fire them “but I was told that was wrong as the
chief Tui Mali will use his power. I may not have chiefly power butI felt I
had the right to sack someone I employ”.
All of this has been chronicled for a documentary, Paradise or Bust (January
21, 9pm, BBC2). In March the project will be halfway through – after the
lease is up, Vorovoro and its village will revert to the Fijians. There are
still only 1,343 members. “At some point I will need financial security,”
Keene says. “I’ve risked everything. But I’m doing the most exciting job.”
It remains to be seen whether his social experiment will pay off, but the
signs are good. From the lookout point on Vorovoro, Ulai sums it up: “I
never thought that one day I would sit here ona computer and talk to the
world about this island. The last time I sat here I was collecting wood with
my grandfather. Who knows what will happen in 10 years’ time?”
Also the first time I had heard of it from last nights TV programme, its good to see efforts made in building sustainable communities, I'd like to see the same thing happen on our very doorstep here in the UK.
Perhaps we can get a group together and build an Eco-Town..
Nanos NDTRA, London, UK
What a massive project you set yourself up for without even knowing the outcome!!! I knew nothing of your online tribe untill last night when i watched the programe. I must say i think its truly corageous and exciting what you have achieved so far, the fiji island looked like a little bit of paradise to me..... Wish i could have been invoved in its development, id love to do something as spontanious and rediculous as that!!! The chief and his family and surrounding friends look really nice people, there hearts apear to be all in the wright place with culture being the up most importance. It makes you realised how in England how busy we all are and how motivated to get the job done we all are, when in other cultures and countrys it apears friendship is the navigator for succssess.
I wish you well with your project and when it finally comes to handing over the project you find the strength to walk away....
Paula, Tamworth, England