Capitalizing on Culture: Moral Ironies in Urban Fiji

Abstract

To an historian or anthropologist familiar with land problems in Fiji, nothing would have been less predictable than the urban discontents over land rights since independence, for these disturbances, in an ethnically plural society whose colonial history is marked by hostility between Indians and Fijians, were among the Fijians themselves. During the whole of the colonial period, from cession of the islands to Britain in 1874 to independence in 1970, the coexistence of Europeans, Indians (first imported as indentured labor), and Fijians had been forged out of land law. Successive colonial administrations labored for four decades around the turn of the century to secure for Fijians a precapitalist system of property rights that would become a bulwark against encroachment by a white planter and settler community. The system “by law established” subsequently became the basis for hostility between several generations of rural Fijian landowners and a growing number of landless Indian peasants. By the time self-government arrived in the mid-1960s, Indian access to land and Fijian resistance thereto was the most important issue threatening the stability of the new state, and government-commissioned reports and legislative acts pointed to this conflict of interest as the most significant problem for an independent Fiji. But the authoritative history written from commission reports and based on administrative policy often conceals another history, that formed by the experience of everyday life, where opposed groups confront each other over interests not always visible to legislators and judges, and often less so to scholarly observers.