The most revealing thing about Paula Manumanunitoga’s “earth oven” post is not the profanity. It is the history behind it.
A union leader threatening to roast people while defending chiefs triggered outrage. Some saw racism. Others asked: why is defending our chiefs racist? Both questions matter. Defending the dignity of chiefs is not racism. Nor is recognising the vanua, chiefly institutions or iTaukei identity. But threatening “you and your kind”, is not indigenous dignity. It is where legitimate grievance becomes hatred and defending identity becomes intimidation.
Barack Obama observed that racial anger is real and powerful, and that condemning it without understanding its roots, only widens the chasm. Fiji needs that honesty: understand anger without surrendering to hatred.
For many iTaukei, chiefs are inseparable from the vanua, ancestry, land and collective memory. The abolition of the BLV was experienced not as institutional change but as an assault on who we are. That wound remains.
Indo-Fijians carry wounds too. Their ancestors did not choose to come as indentured labourers; they were brought through a colonial system. Many families have lived here for five or six generations. They endured indenture, coups and periods when their belonging was questioned. They are not guests.
To say Indo-Fijians are here because chiefs permitted them to remain turns citizenship into a favour and belonging into a conditional contract. That cannot be the basis of modern Fiji.
But equal citizenship must also make room for indigenous identity. Fiji can be a plural republic with indigenous foundations. These are not contradictory. iTaukei society existed long before British rule or the 2013 Constitution. Our languages, customs, chiefly institutions and relationship with the vanua did not begin with the modern State. Acknowledging that, is not racism. It is history.
History must be understood in both directions. Indo-Fijians need to understand why chiefs matter, why land is more than an asset, and why the vanua is not just a constituency. iTaukei must understand the Girmitiya experience: the humiliation of indenture, the struggle to build lives, and the pain of being told to “go back” to a country many Indo-Fijians have never known as home.
Language can be a bridge. Learning iTaukei and respecting its dialects, is not submission. It is respect. It says: I understand I am living in a house whose history began before I arrived.
Our deepest problem is not simply race. It is belonging, power and trust.
In 1874, our chiefs ceded sovereignty to the Crown with expectations about protecting our people, customs and land. Independence transferred political authority to a Fijian State but did not resolve the relationship between indigenous authority, land, chiefly institutions and the modern State. That unfinished business helps explain why leaders repeatedly mobilised indigenous insecurity. The coups did not resolve the iTaukei question. They exploited it and damaged the whole country.
The current constitutional debate must go deeper than immunity. Those who overthrow or undermine elected governments cannot expect permanent immunity. But removing immunity alone will not heal Fiji. We must ask why coups became possible, why indigenous defense resonated so deeply, and why the vanua, chiefly authority and the State remain unsettled.
This is where the wise exercise of power matters. Power is not merely the ability to command. It is knowing when power should be restrained, shared and exercised for the common good.
Now we face another danger: digital amplification. Social media did not create our grievances; algorithms magnify them. Bots manufacture outrage. AI produces distortions. Platforms reward provocation over reconciliation. We risk becoming addicted to algorithmic anger, mistaking screens for reality and the loudest online voice for the voice of the nation.
Look up from the screen. The person beside you is your neighbour, colleague, friend or child — not the caricature from an angry post.
Fiji is one ship. The iTaukei are one of its cabins. Other communities have their own cabins, each carrying history, identity and responsibility. No cabin can ignore the others. Same ocean. Same storm. One ship.
But a ship is also a home. The iTaukei cabin is the first home, built on the vanua before others arrived. Recognising that first foundation does not make everyone else a guest. It means understanding whose house we are in and respecting its foundations. Once aboard, we share the journey. If the ship goes down, there is no separate lifeboat for race.
Fiji can be a plural republic with indigenous foundations — a Pasifika democracy where history is remembered without becoming a weapon; where indigenous identity is recognised without becoming racial ownership; and where equal citizenship does not require erasing the first people.
No erasure of the first people. No guests. No racial ownership of citizenship.
Know whose house you are in. Respect its foundations. Understand the wounds of those who came before you. Look up from the screen. Then help sail this ship called Fiji, together.
