Giving Berth: Fiji, Black Women’s Internationalism, and the Pacific Women’s Conference of 1975

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Abstract This essay is centered on Fiji’s Pacific Women’s Conference (PWC) of 1975. It adds to Africana scholarship by demonstrating how Black women’s internationalism weaved across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean worlds. Organized by Fijian women such as Amelia Rokotuivuna, Claire Slatter, and Vanessa Griffen, the conference was a unified berth for Pacifica women to address the interlocking regional issues of gender, neocolonialism, ecological justice, human rights, ethnicity, race, culture, and sovereignty. These women helped transform Suva, Fiji, into a hub for Pacifica nationalist movements, such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP). They also attended the United Nations World Conference on Women in Mexico City (1975). Slatter and Griffen edited NFIP’s newsletter, Povai, which became a collective voice for Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian anticolonial struggles. The PWC occurred at a critical moment of Indigenous, Global South women’s and anticolonial liberation struggles across the region. Conference participants represented political movements from across New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Tahiti, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas. They denounced French, Australian, American, British, and Indonesian (neo)colonialism and imperialism in the South Pacific. This highlighted the relationships between Oceanic, Asian, African American, Caribbean, and African liberation struggles.