Fiji's culture: two communities, three languages and one bowl of kava

Who counts as a Fijian

For most of the 20th century the word belonged to one community. The constitution of 2013 changed that: section 5 states that all citizens of Fiji shall be known as Fijians, and the indigenous people are called iTaukei, their own name in Fijian, which a decree of 2010 had already written into every law in place of "Fijian" or "indigenous". The change was argued over before it was made. When it was proposed in August 2008, the deposed prime minister Laisenia Qarase said the name belonged to indigenous Fijians alone, and the Methodist Church, to which most iTaukei belong, called the proposal "daylight robbery". The interim government held that all citizens were equal and should share it.

The two large communities are the iTaukei, Melanesian by classification though, in Britannica's description, closer to Polynesia in social and political organisation, and the Indo-Fijians, most of them descended from the indentured labourers of 1879 to 1916 and some from free migrants who came later, often in trade or the professions. Wikipedia gives their shares as 54.3% and 38.1%. The indentured labourers called their contracts girmit, agreements, and were known as girmitya; on the plantations they lived in the hovels known as coolie lines, and Girmitya ancestry is still the term that separates their descendants from the free migrants who followed. Rotumans, whose culture is closer to Tonga and Samoa than to the rest of Fiji, make up about 1.2%, and there are smaller communities of part-Europeans, Chinese, other Pacific Islanders and the Banabans resettled on Rabi. Britannica notes that there is little intermarriage between the main communities, that Suva is mixed, and that the sugar districts are mostly Indo-Fijian while iTaukei in rural areas and on the smaller islands live in villages.

How the village and the vanua are organised

iTaukei society is built on land and descent. The vanua is the land and the people bound to it, and a hierarchy of chiefs presides over villages, clans and larger groupings. Chiefly titles pass by heredity, though not necessarily from father to son; the Wikipedia account of Fijian culture reads this as a Polynesian trait, since in most other Melanesian societies leaders are chosen on merit.

The largest unit is the yavusa, the descendants in the male line of a deified ancestor. It divides into mataqali, clans each with a duty. The turaga provide the chief; the sau turaga support and install him; the mata ni vanua are the heralds who run ceremonies; the bete were priests through whom the ancestor spoke; and the dau and matai are the craftsmen, among them composers, treasurers and canoe builders. The mataqali are also the units that own land, which is why the clan structure matters to every lease and every cane farm.

Above the districts sit three confederacies, the matanitu. Kubuna covers Tailevu, Ra, Naitasiri, Lomaiviti and parts of Yasawa and Ba; Burebasaga covers the rest of Viti Levu; and Tovata covers Vanua Levu, the Lau islands and Rotuma. They are not administrative units, but they still carry weight in iTaukei social life.

What yaqona and the tabua mean in ceremony

Kava, called yaqona in Fijian and made from the root of Piper methysticum, is the national drink. It was once kept for important ceremonies; it is now drunk socially as well, by iTaukei and Indo-Fijians alike, Britannica notes. The protocol is strict: the drinker claps once, takes the cup, drinks it in one draught and hands it back to the bearer. It is served from a tanoa, a broad carved wooden bowl, and wood carving now survives mainly in tourism except in the making of these bowls.

The highest-valued object in ceremony is the tabua, a polished sperm whale tooth on a cord. Bark cloth, masi, and fine mats are presented with it. All of them appear in the installations and marriages of high chiefs, which Britannica describes as the occasions where traditional crafts are most practised, and in the bulubulu, a ceremony of reconciliation between an offender and the person wronged, in which kava and a tabua are offered.

Which languages Fiji speaks

English was the only official language until 1997 and is still the language of government, business and schooling. The 1997 constitution gave English, Fijian and Hindi equal status, and the 2013 constitution requires the iTaukei and Hindi versions of its own text to be made available, with English prevailing where they differ. Section 31 makes conversational iTaukei and Fiji Hindi compulsory subjects in every primary school. Britannica notes that most people speak at least two languages.

Fijian is an Austronesian language with many dialects, divided broadly into eastern and western groups. Missionaries in the 1840s chose the speech of Bau, Cakobau's island, as the written standard, and Bauan Fijian is still the form most widely used. The spelling they settled on surprises English readers: c is the th of "then", so Laucala is said Lauthala; d is nd, so Nadi is Nandi; b is mb, so Ba is Mba; and q is the ngg of "finger", so Beqa is Mbengga. Wikipedia counts about 350,000 native speakers and another 200,000 who use it as a second language.

Fiji Hindi, also called Fiji Baat, is the everyday language of most Indo-Fijians. It formed on the plantations as a koine of the eastern Hindi varieties the labourers brought, mainly Awadhi, which 40% of them spoke, with Bhojpuri influence and loanwords from Fijian and English. Standard Hindi remains the language of education and most writing. Other languages are spoken in pockets: Rotuman, Cantonese, Gilbertese on Rabi and Tuvaluan on Kioa. In informal talk the three main languages mix into what is called Fiji English.

How faith divides the population

Religion follows community closely. At the 2017 census, according to Wikipedia, 69.2% of the population was Christian, 24.0% Hindu and 5.8% Muslim. Almost all iTaukei are Christian, most of them Methodist; most Indo-Fijians are Hindu, with a substantial Muslim minority. The census series from the Fiji Bureau of Statistics shows the Hindu count falling between 1996 and 2007, and Wikipedia attributes the falling Indo-Fijian share of the population to emigration.

The Methodist Church of Fiji and Rotuma traces its weight to Cakobau's conversion in 1854, which brought most Fijians under Methodist missions. Hindus belong mostly to the Sanatan tradition, about 74.3% of them at the 1996 census, with a smaller Arya Samaj movement that in the 1920s campaigned against child marriage and for girls' schooling. Most Muslims are Sunni. The 2013 constitution declares a secular state: section 4 separates religion from the state and calls religious belief personal.

The festivals are shared out between the calendars. Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is a public holiday, and so is Christmas, which is celebrated with a lovo feast of fish, taro and pork. Fire-walking is practised in two quite different traditions: by the Sawau people of Beqa, who walk on heated stones after strict preparation and tell of an ancestor given the power by a spirit he caught while fishing for eels, and by Hindu devotees at a festival Britannica dates to the full moon of July or early August.

How crafts and dance are passed on

Crafts were divided by sex. Women make pottery, notably at Nalotu on Kadavu and in Nadroga and Rewa; masi from the bark of the paper mulberry, decorated in charcoal, with Vatuelele off the south coast of Viti Levu known for it; and mats of pandanus leaf, scraped, boiled and sun-dried, the kuta of Bua among them. Men carved and built canoes. The drua, a double-hulled war canoe that could carry upward of 150 warriors, took six or seven years to build; only a few builders still practise the craft. The Fiji Museum in Suva's Thurston Gardens keeps war canoes among its collections.

Dress shows the same mix. The national dress is the sulu, a wrapped length of cloth worn by men and women. Men in towns often wear the tailored sulu vaka taga with a collared shirt, tie and jacket, and the military has taken it into its ceremonial uniform. Women wear layered bark cloth on formal occasions, sometimes as a sheath across the chest, or a sulu i ra with a matching top. In Dama village in Bua people wear the woven reed mats called kuta.

The old village had its own architecture: square houses with steep pyramid-shaped thatched roofs, a meeting house, and a spirit house, the bure kalou, raised on a stone and earth platform. The village plan survives with modern materials, and churches have taken the place of the spirit houses.

The meke is the indigenous performing art, a sung narrative of a war, an installation or a scandal, danced as the women's fan dance, seasea, or the men's spear dance, meke wesi. Each district has its own form in its own dialect, and some are generations old. Indian and Chinese dances appear at their communities' festivals, and Indian films fill cinemas.

Food runs on the lovo, an earth oven of heated stones in a pit, in which parcels wrapped in leaves are buried to cook. Palusami, parcels of taro leaves soaked in coconut milk with onion, is one of the dishes cooked in it. Indian cooking and spices have entered most kitchens, and European and Chinese dishes are common too. Fiji has several daily newspapers and a multilingual public radio service alongside private stations broadcasting in Fijian, Hindi and English. Written literature in English and Fijian dates from the years around independence, with Raymond Pillai's stories and Pio Manoa's poetry among the first published works.

Why rugby sevens carries the national team

Rugby union is the most popular team sport, and sevens is where Fiji has won abroad. Olympedia records that Fiji's National Olympic Committee was formed on 25 March 1949, recognised in 1955 and first sent athletes in 1956. Its first Olympic medal was the men's rugby sevens gold of 2016, won by beating Great Britain 43 to 7 in the final; the men won gold again at the Tokyo Games of 2020, the women took bronze there, and the men won silver in Paris in 2024. All four of Fiji's Olympic medals are in rugby sevens. The sevens side has also won the Hong Kong Sevens eighteen times since 1976 and the Rugby World Cup Sevens in 1997 and 2005.

Rugby league, played by the national team known as the Bati, reached the World Cup semi-finals in 2008, 2013 and 2019. Football grew first among Indo-Fijians and is now played widely, and netball is the main women's team sport. Britannica notes that Fiji also supplies rugby players to professional leagues abroad. Older games, among them tiqa, ulutoa, veisaga and veicolo, were once part of training young warriors and are no longer played, while Britannica lists wrestling, women's canoe races on Rotuma and outrigger canoeing among the sports that continue.