Sir Lala Sukuna and the Establishment of the Fijian Administration

Abstract

cated native (especially one not of a chiefly or warrior caste) who has separated himself from traditional, primitive virtue without (if only by reason of his color) becoming a European; there is indeed a vocabulary and a literature to express the distaste Professor Arthur Lewis once mentioned to a group of colonial service officers when he told them: I am the kind of native you dislike most: the educated one. But occasionally traditional virtues and educated sensibility combine, especially in brown rather than black colonies, to earn British respect and so to achieve a dominance in colonial politics. Such was the case with Joseva Lalabalavu Vanaaliali Sukuna, the principal architect and the most eloquent advocate of the Fijian Administration which was set up in 1945. Sukuna was a high, although not the highest, ranking Fijian. In a society which traced descent and status through males, he was the grandson of Adi Asenaca, second daughter by his first legitimate union, of Cakobau, styled King of Fiji, who ceded the islands to the British government in 1874.2 Born in 1888, Sukuna was the first