In a quiet act of reclamation, the Pasifika nation of Nauru returns to its linguistic soul. Now the Republic of Naoero, its new name sheds the foreign tongue’s ease for the cadence of its own speech. Its people will be Dei-Naoero—not Nauruans—and even its postal code shifts, a small but profound signal. Like Türkiye and Eswatini, this is more than rebranding; it is dignity etched into letters. I admire Dei-Naoero for this courage. To rename oneself is to remember, and in remembering, to stand a little taller.
The Fiji flag, a serene blue field with the Union Jack ensconced in its corner, is a picture of politeness. It is a visual apology; a quiet nod to a past that, on paper, ended over half a century ago. But as we navigate the complexities of the 21st century, that small, persistent symbol in our corner whispers a larger, more insidious truth: we are still clutching the relics of a colonial mindset, not just in our deeds, but in our very definition of ourselves.
To question the flag is not to be unpatriotic; it is to be honest. It is to ask why the image of a distant monarch must be our national imprimatur. We have swapped the war club for the memorandum, the colonial government for a democratic one, yet the underlying architecture of power and perception remains a colonial blueprint. We have been conditioned to believe that our value must be validated by an external, often Western, yardstick. We import governance models that don’t fit our communal foundations, measure our economic success by GDP metrics designed for industrial nations, and consume a globalized culture that drowns out our own indigenous narratives.
This mindset is evident in our institutional thinking. Our education system, for years, prioritized a curriculum that felt more at home in London than in Levuka. We are taught to aspire to the comfort and order of a foreign standard, often at the expense of understanding our own intricate socio-cultural tapestry. Our economic policies; historically geared towards monoculture exports, reflect a system designed for the Empire’s convenience, not for the resilience of our islands. We continue to be “Fiji glad”—content, or at least quiet, in a system that encourages us to be passive recipients rather than active architects of our destiny. Yet we have more educated Fijians than ever before in more than half a century—a resource we squander when we continue to look outward for validation.
But the most profound colonisation is of the mind. It is the internalized voice that tells us our iTaukei traditions are quaint but not modern, that our Hindi is a language of the home but not of the boardroom. It is the subtle, unspoken hierarchy that still sees “overseas experience” as the ultimate qualification, placing a foreign passport on a pedestal. We perpetuate this in our actions when we favor international consultants over local knowledge, and in our words when we default to a belief that “they” know better.
Nauru’s courage reminds us that renaming is remembering. To change our flag is to begin the arduous work of decolonizing our own minds. It is a declaration that we are not the leftover of an empire, but the centre of our own universe. It is acknowledging that our strength lies in our Vanua, in the collective wisdom of our Chiefs, in the resilience of our multi-ethnic communities, and in the vast ocean that connects us, not the one that separates us.
It is time to sever the final symbolic tether. Let us design a flag that speaks of our sunrise, not a foreign sunset. Let us stand a little taller, as Dei-Naoero has shown us. Because until the symbol in our corner changes, the mindset in our heads will never truly be free.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 