Fiji's history: a colony's rules on land and labour, argued over since 1970

Who lived in the islands before Europeans came

The first settlers reached Fiji from the islands of Melanesia at least 3,500 years ago, according to Britannica, carrying food plants, the pig and the decorated pottery known as Lapita ware. From Fiji the Lapita culture was carried on to Tonga and Samoa. Archaeologists have found signs of settlement on Moturiki from 600 BC and possibly from 900 BC, and Fijian pots have turned up in Samoa and the Marquesas.

Most communities were small and lived near ridge forts, clearing land by slash and burn. The delta country of south-east Viti Levu was different. There, irrigated taro supported dense settlements protected by massive ring-ditch fortifications. Society was ranked: leaders were chosen by descent and by achievement, and people were organised through residence and kinship, in clans called mataqali. Alliances shifted, confederations formed under high chiefs, and warfare was common.

Tonga was the closest outside power. From the 10th century Fiji lay within the sphere of the Tu'i Tonga, which brought Polynesian custom and words into the Lau islands before it declined in the 13th century. Trade ran in both directions. Fijian builders made large sailing canoes, the drua, and some were exported to Tonga. Polished sperm whale teeth, tabua, circulated as valuables, and bark cloth was made into sails and clothing.

How sandalwood and muskets raised Bau

Abel Tasman sighted the north-east fringe of the group in 1643 and James Cook passed the southern Lau islands in 1774. William Bligh sailed between Viti Levu and Vanua Levu in his open boat after the Bounty mutiny in 1789, and the strait he used is still called Bligh Water.

Trade began with sandalwood. Traders found it on the south-west coast of Vanua Levu in 1804, and the accessible stands were cut out within about a decade. From the 1820s ships came back for bêche-de-mer, the sea cucumber dried for the Chinese market. That trade needed Fijian labour for gathering, cleaning and drying, and it was often paid in muskets. By the end of the 1820s most chiefs had firearms. Levuka, on Ovalau, grew into the first European-style town.

The guns sharpened old rivalries. Bau, a small island off the east coast of Viti Levu, rose under Naulivou and then under his nephew Cakobau, who held the title Vunivalu. His rival was Enele Ma'afu, a Tongan chief who settled on Lakeba in 1848 and led an army of Christian Tongans and eastern Fijian allies. Under a United States naval blockade over claims by the American consul John Brown Williams, and with Ma'afu's Tongans backing the missions, Cakobau accepted Christianity on 30 April 1854. Most Fijians came under the influence of Methodist missionaries as a result, and Roman Catholic and Anglican missions arriving later had less success.

Why Cakobau offered the islands to Britain

American claims for damages left Cakobau with a debt he could not pay. In 1858 he signed an offer to cede the islands to Britain, hoping for protection from the United States and from Ma'afu. London took four years to consider it and in 1862 declined, judging Fiji isolated, unlikely to pay and Cakobau one chief among many with no authority to cede it.

The American Civil War changed the arithmetic. With cotton prices rising, hundreds of settlers arrived from Australia and the United States in the 1860s, often acquiring land by fraud or for guns and alcohol. Plantation labour came from other islands. On 5 July 1865 Ben Pease received the first licence to bring 40 labourers from the New Hebrides, and over the 46 years to 1911, when the trade was banned, about 45,000 Islanders were taken to Fiji, roughly a quarter of whom died while under contract. Fijians were sold as well: in 1871 about two thousand Lovoni people of Ovalau were sold to settlers at £6 a head after defeat by Cakobau's government.

That government, a Kingdom of Fiji with Cakobau as monarch, was formed in June 1871 under settler influence. Its troops fought the Kai Colo, the unconverted clans of the Viti Levu interior, from March to October 1873, and about a thousand prisoners were sent to Levuka, where some were hanged and the rest sold to plantations. The kingdom still could not collect taxes, and cotton prices had collapsed. On 21 March 1874 Cakobau made a final offer to cede. On 10 October 1874 Cakobau, Ma'afu and senior chiefs signed two copies of the Deed of Cession, and Fiji became a British crown colony.

The first months of British rule brought disaster. Cakobau and his two sons returned from a visit to Sydney carrying measles, the ship was not quarantined, and the epidemic of 1875 to 1876 killed more than 40,000 Fijians, about a third of the population. Some Fijians who survived believed the disease had been introduced on purpose. Historians have found no evidence of intent, and the outbreak spread before the new governor and his medical officers had arrived.

What Governor Gordon decided about land and labour

Sir Arthur Gordon arrived as governor in June 1875, crushed a highland rising along the Sigatoka River in what he called the "Little War" of 1876, and then set the rules the colony would run on. Britannica describes him as seeing himself as the protector of the Fijian people. Sales of Fijian land were banned. Fijians paid tax in produce and were governed through their own chiefs, under appointed officials with chiefly titles and a Great Council of Chiefs answerable to the governor.

To keep those policies and still develop the colony's economy, Gordon turned to India. He decided in 1878 to import indentured labourers, and the first 463 arrived on the Leonidas on 14 May 1879. The Australian-owned Colonial Sugar Refining Company began operating in Fiji in 1880 and stayed until 1973. In 1909 the pattern of land ownership was frozen and further sales prohibited.

Contracts ran five years. After a second term a labourer could take a free passage back or stay, and most stayed. Britannica dates the end of the indenture system to 1920, after which Indian grievances over land and political rights produced strikes and challenged the dominance of a small European community. Little land was for sale, and Indo-Fijian farmers came to lease the land they worked from its Fijian owners.

Fijian resistance did not stop with the Little War. Leaders of the Tuka movement, which called for a return to the old gods, were jailed and exiled, and in 1891 whole villages sympathetic to it were deported. In 1914 Apolosi Nawai founded the Viti Kabani, a Fijian co-operative meant to bypass European planters; he was arrested in 1915, and was jailed and exiled repeatedly until his death in 1946.

How the colony moved towards independence

Fijians were not allowed to enlist in the First World War. Ratu Lala Sukuna, a great-grandson of Cakobau, joined the French Foreign Legion, won the Croix de Guerre and came home in 1921 with a law degree from Oxford. He went on to build the early institutions of the Fijian administration. In the Second World War Fiji was an Allied training base, an airstrip was built at Nadi, and Fijian soldiers served as scouts in the Solomon Islands campaign. Indo-Fijians refused to serve on terms worse than those offered to Europeans, and Britannica records that the refusal was later held against them.

Representation came by stages and by community. From 1904 European men elected 6 of the 19 members of the Legislative Council; the first Indian member was nominated in 1916 and elected from 1929. Ethnic Fijians voted for the first time in 1963. Britannica describes the move to independence as a response to British and international pressure more than to demand within Fiji. The 1966 constitution and the London conferences of 1965 and April 1970 kept ethnic rolls: in the 52-seat House of Representatives, Fijians and Indo-Fijians had 22 seats each and general electors 8, under a Senate dominated by chiefs, who held an effective veto over changes to the status of Fijians. Fiji became independent on 10 October 1970, the 96th anniversary of cession.

Why the army overthrew an elected government

The Alliance Party under Ratu Kamisese Mara governed from independence until April 1987. Its one scare came in March 1977, when the mainly Indo-Fijian National Federation Party won a narrow majority of seats but split over its leadership, and the governor-general reappointed Mara pending a new election that September.

In April 1987 a coalition of the National Federation Party and the new Labour Party, led by Timoci Bavadra, an ethnic Fijian, won the election and formed a government whose members in the legislature were mostly Indo-Fijian. On 14 May 1987 Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka deposed it, demanding, in Britannica's account, greater protection for Fijian rights and Fijian dominance of any future government. When negotiations led by the governor-general stalled, Rabuka staged a second coup on 25 September, revoked the 1970 constitution and declared a republic on 10 October 1987. The Commonwealth suspended Fiji's membership that October.

A constitution promulgated on 25 July 1990 reserved majorities in both houses for ethnic Fijians. More than 12,000 Indo-Fijians and members of other minorities left in the two years after the coups, and in 1989 government figures showed ethnic Fijians a majority of the population for the first time since 1946. Rabuka became prime minister after the 1992 election, set up a review commission, and backed a new constitution that opened the office of prime minister to all communities while writing Fijian ownership of most land into the text. President Mara signed it on 25 July 1997; Wikipedia dates its entry into force to 27 July 1997 and Britannica to 1998. Fiji returned to the Commonwealth that October.

How the later coups unfolded

In May 1999 Mahendra Chaudhry became the first prime minister of Indian descent. On 19 May 2000 an armed group led by the businessman George Speight, who said he acted for indigenous Fijians, took Chaudhry and his government hostage in the parliamentary complex. Indian-owned businesses in Suva were looted. The army declared martial law, the Great Council of Chiefs named Ratu Josefa Iloilo interim president, and the hostages were released after 56 days. In November the High Court found the military-installed government illegitimate, and the elections of August and September 2001 confirmed the interim premier, Laisenia Qarase, in office.

The military and the Qarase government then fell out over a bill offering amnesty to participants in the 2000 coup. The commander, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, citing corruption and opposing the amnesty, seized power on 5 December 2006 and in January 2007 was named interim prime minister. When the Court of Appeal ruled in April 2009 that his government had been installed illegally, President Iloilo announced on 10 April that he had abrogated the 1997 constitution and dismissed the judges, and reappointed Bainimarama. Emergency regulations limited assembly and censored the press. On 2 May 2009 Fiji became the first member suspended from the Pacific Islands Forum, and on 1 September 2009 the Commonwealth, whose secretariat dates its suspension of Fiji from December 2006, made the suspension full.

What the current constitution settled

The government abolished the Great Council of Chiefs in March 2012, calling it a colonial relic, rejected a draft prepared by an independent team it had commissioned, and brought its own constitution into force on 7 September 2013. That text calls every citizen a Fijian, replaced ethnic rolls with a single national roll under proportional representation, and states that iTaukei land may not be permanently alienated except to the state. The government stressed its guarantee of an independent judiciary; Britannica records that international human rights groups criticised its immunity for coup participants and its emergency powers.

The election of 17 September 2014, won by Bainimarama's FijiFirst party with 59.2% of the vote, ended the transition. Australia's foreign ministry records that the Commonwealth welcomed Fiji back on 26 September 2014 and the Pacific Islands Forum on 22 October 2014. In December 2024 Fiji enacted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act to hear testimony about the coup years, which the same ministry describes as aimed at healing and social cohesion.