Fiji
A republic of nine hundred thousand on a scatter of South Pacific islands, and really two peoples in one country: the iTaukei of the vanua and the Indo-Fijians of the cane fields. The complete guide, the forces first.
Fiji is a republic of about nine hundred thousand people on a great scatter of islands in the South Pacific, and it is really two peoples sharing one country. The indigenous iTaukei, a little over half, live within the vanua, the binding of land, people, chiefs, and ancestors into one whole, ordered by clans and chiefs and held together by kava and ceremony. The Indo-Fijians, a little over a third, descend from the labourers the British brought from India to cut sugar cane in the colonial age, and carry their own language, their Hinduism and Islam, and their own long history on the land. The story of Fiji is the story of these two peoples, their customs, their faiths, and their long and sometimes hard effort to live as one nation.
The vanua
The deepest idea in indigenous Fijian life is the vanua, a word that means the land, and at the same time the people who belong to it, the chiefs who lead them, and the ancestors who came before. To an iTaukei, the indigenous Fijian, these are not separate things but one whole: the land is the body of the people, and the people are the human face of the land, bound together with those who have died and those not yet born. A person is not an individual standing on a piece of ground so much as a part of a living vanua that holds them, names them, and gives them their place in the world.
From this comes the Fijian bond to land, which is held to be a thing of life rather than a thing of property. The relationship runs both ways: the land gives the people their food, their identity, and their belonging, and in return the people are its guardians, holding it in trust for those who went before and those still to come. Land is not something a person owns and may sell, but something a group keeps. Most of Fiji's land, far more than in almost any comparable country, is held in exactly this way, owned by indigenous clans together and by law unable to be sold, only leased; a national board oversees the leasing so that the ground may earn a living without ever passing out of the people's hands.
The vanua is the frame within which the rest of iTaukei culture makes sense. The clans and the chiefs, the ceremonies of kava and the whale's tooth, the feasts and the courtesies of the village, are all ways of tending the vanua and a person's place within it. It is also the heart of the hardest question in Fijian life, for the land that the iTaukei hold so closely is the same land that the other half of Fiji, the descendants of the cane labourers, have long needed to farm and to live on. To understand Fiji at all is to begin with the vanua.
The chiefs and the clan
Indigenous Fijian society is finely ranked, and a person is born into a place within it. The building block is the family unit, the tokatoka, several of which make up a clan, the mataqali, which is the body that holds the land. Several mataqali in turn make up a wider tribe, the yavusa, and the yavusa together belong to a vanua, the homeland, with its paramount chief; above these again stand the great confederations that bind whole regions. Each unit has its head, and a person knows their rank and their duties by where they fall within this order.
At the head of the clans stand the chiefs, the turaga, addressed as Ratu if a man and Adi if a woman, with other honoured titles in different regions. A chief's standing is largely inherited and confirmed by installation, and is held, as a rule, for life; a chief carries the dignity of the vanua, settles its affairs, and stands for it in dealings with others. Marriage among the iTaukei was traditionally less a joining of two people than of two clans, arranged to bind the groups together, and much of the intricate courtesy of Fijian life turns on knowing how one is related to those around one.
Above the chiefs of the vanua once sat the Great Council of Chiefs, the assembly of the high chiefs of all Fiji, brought together under British rule in the eighteen-seventies and long the guardian of indigenous custom, land, and authority in the modern state. Fiji itself passed under British control in 1874, when a number of its leading chiefs ceded the islands to the Crown, and the British chose to govern the iTaukei through their own chiefs and to leave the clan and the land in place, which is much of why the chiefly order survives so strongly today. The council has been abolished and restored again in recent years, a sign of how live the question of chiefly power remains, but the rank it embodied still orders village and vanua across the country.
Yaqona, the sevusevu, and the tabua
The medium through which Fijians conduct the serious business of relationship is yaqona, the drink the rest of the Pacific calls kava, made from the pounded root of a pepper plant, mixed with water in a broad wooden bowl, the tanoa, and served round in cups of half a coconut shell. Once it was reserved for priests, chiefs, and elders; now all may drink it, and a bowl of yaqona accompanies almost everything of weight in Fijian life, the welcomes, the weddings, the funerals, and the long evening talks where a village settles its affairs. The drinking follows an order of rank, with set claps and words marking the giving and the receiving.
The act that opens the door is the sevusevu. A visitor who comes to a village brings a bundle of yaqona root and presents it to the chief, with a spokesman speaking the words of respect, and the chief's acceptance turns the visitor from a stranger into a guest with leave to be there. It is not a fee but an acknowledgement: to step into a village is to step into the domain of the vanua, and the sevusevu is how one asks the land and its chief for welcome. The same logic of presentation runs through the whole of Fijian ceremony, each gift naming the weight of the occasion and the bond being made.
At the far and highest end of this stands the tabua, a polished tooth of the sperm whale, the most honoured object a Fijian can give. Where the bundle of kava asks for welcome, the tabua speaks of the gravest matters: it is presented to seek a bride, to beg forgiveness and heal a breach between families or clans in the ceremony of atonement, to install a chief, and once to seal peace between warring powers. To accept a tabua is to be bound to honour the request that comes with it, and its giving is among the most solemn acts in the culture, treated with a reverence that sets it apart from any ordinary gift.
Two peoples, one nation
Fiji is, more than almost any other Pacific country, two peoples in one land. A little over half are iTaukei, the indigenous Fijians of the vanua; a little over a third are Indo-Fijians, the descendants of labourers brought from India, and the meeting of the two is the central fact of the nation's modern life. The Indo-Fijian story begins with sugar. When Fiji became a British colony, its first governor chose not to put the indigenous Fijians to work on the plantations, both to shield their communal life and because their chiefly order did not lend itself to wage labour, and so between 1879 and 1916 the British shipped in some sixty thousand workers from India under labour contracts.
The contract was called girmit, from the English word agreement, and those who came called themselves girmitiya, the people of the agreement. They worked five-year terms cutting cane in conditions that were harsh and near to bondage, housed in lines of mean huts, and when their terms ended most chose to stay rather than return, taking up small leases of land to farm. On the plantations the old divisions of caste and region broke down, and out of the shared hardship a new people formed, with its own tongue, a Fiji Hindi grown from the speech of the migrants, and its own faiths carried from India. For a century sugar, grown largely by Indo-Fijian farmers on land leased from iTaukei clans, was the backbone of the country.
By the middle of the twentieth century the Indo-Fijians had grown to nearly half the people, and at times the larger half, while political power rested with the iTaukei, and the strain between the two communities has marked Fiji ever since. It has broken out in a series of overturnings of elected governments, beginning in 1987 and recurring around the turn of the century, each turning on the fear of one community for its place against the other, and each sending many Indo-Fijians abroad, so that their share of the people has fallen back. Yet the two peoples have also built a shared country, their foods, their festivals, and their daily lives long since woven together, and recent years have brought a settled language of common citizenship and a yearly day of remembrance for the first labourers who landed. The question of how two peoples share one land, and above all how they share its ground, remains the open question of Fiji.
The lovo, the feast, and the sharing
A Fijian gathering is built around food, and the food is cooked in the lovo, an oven dug into the ground and lined with stones heated in a fire, on which pork, fish, root crops, and parcels of food wrapped in leaves are laid and covered over to bake. The feast that comes from it, the magiti, is the centre of every wedding, funeral, and ceremony, a great spread meant to be shared widely and carried home, for to feed people abundantly is to honour them and the occasion both. The cooking and the serving are communal work, and the abundance is the point.
Behind the feast lies a wider habit of sharing that orders iTaukei life, the custom of kerekere. By it a person may ask a relative or fellow villager for something they need, a tool, food, money, a hand with a task, and the request is expected to be met; to hold tightly to one's own against the needs of one's kin is poor form, and what circulates through the group binds it together. The same principle runs upward into the great ceremonial exchanges between whole villages and clans, the solevu, where one group presents another with mats, cloth, food, and valuables in a formal giving that is answered in its turn, knitting the vanua together through what passes between its parts.
This way of holding wealth, as something that moves and binds rather than something one keeps and counts, sits at the heart of iTaukei life and sets it apart from the cash economy around it. It is a source of the deep security of belonging to a Fijian community, where no one with kin goes without, and at the same time a strain on those who would save or build a business, since the claims of kerekere are hard to refuse. The feast and the sharing are the vanua fed and kept whole, the land's abundance moving through its people.
Meke, masi, and the bure
The story-telling art of Fiji is the meke, a performance of dance, chant, and song in which a line or circle of dancers act out the legends, the histories, and the deeds of the people. Men and women have their own forms, the men's often martial, with clubs and spears and a vigour recalling the warriors of old, the women's more flowing; a chanted poetry and the beat of wood and hollow drum carry the dancers, and a meke is given to welcome guests of honour and to mark the great occasions. In a culture that long kept its knowledge in memory rather than writing, the meke is a way the past is held and handed on.
The cloth of ceremony is masi, the barkcloth beaten from the inner bark of the paper mulberry and printed with bold geometric patterns in brown and black. It clothes a bride and groom, hangs at a feast, wraps a gift, and marks a space as ceremonial, and the making of it, like the weaving of the pandanus mats that are also given and treasured, is the work of women and a store of a family's wealth. Everyday respectable dress, for men and women alike, is the sulu, the wrapped skirt, worn even in its tailored form with a shirt and tie to church and to work as the proper attire of a Fijian.
The old house of Fiji is the bure, a building of timber posts and a high thatched roof, its floor spread with mats, bound and lashed together with coconut-fibre cord rather than nails. The grandest was the chief's house and the meeting house of the village, raised on a mound and built with the labour of the whole community. Fewer Fijians live in a bure now than once did, the village houses largely of timber and tin today, but the bure remains the image of the Fijian home and is still raised for ceremony, for the chief, and increasingly for the visitors who come to see the old way of building.
The village and its courtesies
To enter a Fijian village is to enter a place with its own order and its own courtesies, and a visitor is expected to observe them. The first is the sevusevu already described, the presenting of kava to the chief that asks for welcome; until it is given and accepted one has not truly been received. Beyond it lie the courtesies of the body, which an iTaukei reads closely. Shoes are removed before entering a house, the dirt of the outside left at the door. One lowers oneself when passing people who are seated, rather than standing over them, and avoids pointing the soles of the feet at others, especially at elders and chiefs.
Above all there is the head, which in Fijian feeling is the most sacred part of a person, and most sacred of all on a chief. To touch another person's head, even a child's in fondness, is a serious liberty, and a hat worn in a village or before a chief is taken as a discourtesy, as though one set one's own head above those around one. Dress is modest, the shoulders and the knees covered, the voice kept low and unhurried; loud or hasty manners read as disrespect in a culture that prizes a calm and yielding bearing toward others.
The village itself, the koro, is a community that lives and works together under its headman and its chief, its people bound by the labour, the giving, and the gatherings they owe one another. In the iTaukei villages the rhythm of the week still turns on the church, and Sunday is kept quiet and still, given over to worship, to rest, and to the family meal, much as it is across the Christian Pacific. The courtesies of the village are not empty forms but the daily working of respect, the small acts by which a person honours the vanua and their place within it.
Faith across two peoples
Religion in Fiji runs largely along the line between its two peoples, and it shapes the life of each. The iTaukei are overwhelmingly Christian, and most of them Methodist, the faith having arrived with Wesleyan missionaries in the eighteen-thirties and spread with great speed once the paramount chief Cakobau took it in the eighteen-fifties. The Methodist church became woven into iTaukei identity itself, its village congregations, its choirs singing in rich harmony, and its yearly giving central to community life, and it has carried real weight in the nation's politics as a voice of indigenous Fiji. Catholic, Adventist, and Pentecostal churches share the field, and across the indigenous villages Sunday is the still and sacred centre of the week.
The Indo-Fijians brought their faiths from India and have kept them through five generations and more. Most are Hindu, their temples standing in the towns and the cane districts, among them a great temple at Nadi counted the largest in the southern half of the world, and their festival of lights, Diwali, is a public holiday kept with such warmth, with lamps and fireworks and shared sweets, that it has become one of the nation's shared occasions. A smaller number are Muslim, long established in the same towns, marking the feasts of Eid as public events, and there are smaller communities again of Sikhs and others.
For the most part the two religious worlds run side by side rather than together, each tied to its own people and its own places, and Fiji's history shows that faith and ethnic feeling have sometimes reinforced one another in the country's divisions. Yet the festivals are increasingly shared as national holidays, the law treats the country as one of many faiths, and the everyday life of the towns mixes temple, mosque, and church along the same streets. The two faiths of Fiji are a large part of what makes it two peoples, and also part of how those peoples have learned to live as one.
The republic and its peoples
The Republic of Fiji is a country of about nine hundred thousand people spread across some three hundred islands, of which around a hundred are lived on. The two great islands carry most of the nation: Viti Levu, where the capital Suva and the tourist towns of Nadi and Lautoka lie and where most Fijians live, and Vanua Levu to the north. Fiji took its independence from Britain in 1970 and became a republic in the upheavals of the nineteen-eighties, and it has known a turbulent politics since, with elected governments overturned more than once and long passages of military rule, before returning to the ballot in the past decade under a settlement that names all its people, indigenous and Indo-Fijian alike, as one common citizenry.
The old questions have not all been answered, and the deepest of them is still the land. So much of Fiji's ground is held inalienably by the iTaukei clans, and so much of its farming has been done by Indo-Fijians on leases of that ground, that the running and the renewing of those leases touches the rawest nerve in the country, the indigenous fear of losing the land set against the Indo-Fijian fear of losing the farms. Around it the economy has shifted from the sugar that the cane farmers built toward tourism, which now brings in the most, drawing visitors to the beaches and the reefs while the work of the islands goes on behind them.
If anything binds the two peoples plainly, it is rugby. Fiji is a giant of the running, passing game, and its sevens team, playing the fast version of the sport, won the country its first Olympic gold and the heart of the whole nation with it, a triumph cheered by iTaukei and Indo-Fijian together. The islands carry hard burdens too, lying in the path of fierce cyclones and on the front line of a rising sea, and many of their people now live and work abroad, sending money home. Through it all Fiji remains what it has long been, a warm and generous country and a difficult, hopeful effort at two peoples making one nation, on islands they now share as home.