There is an enduring paradox in our islands that deserves honest reflection.
The iTaukei have historically maintained deep relationships with other Pasifika communities. We share cultural affinities with Rotumans, our Melanesian Wantok brothers and sisters, Banabans on Rabi, Tuvaluans on Kioa, and our neighbours in Tonga and Samoa and beyond. Despite differences in language and custom, we often understand one another instinctively.
Yet after nearly 150 years of living together, why do iTaukei and Indo-Fijians still so frequently speak past each other on questions of identity, belonging and nationhood?
The answer lies in two different understandings of belonging. For many Indo-Fijians, Fiji is understood primarily through a modern civic contract: a nation of equal citizens governed by common laws, individual rights and democratic institutions. For many iTaukei, Fiji is also an inherited covenant: an ancestral relationship between people, land, sea, customary institutions and generations yet unborn.
Both understandings contain essential truths. Our difficulty begins when either is treated as sufficient on its own.
Indigeneity Is Not Simply Ethnicity
At the heart of this misunderstanding is a distinction our current constitutional debates often neglect. Indigeneity is not merely an ethnicity, another demographic category competing for resources. It is an ancestral relationship between a people, their Vanua, customary institutions, language and the land and sea from which their civilisation emerged.
That relationship predates the modern State. When the Deed of Cession was signed in 1874, the chiefs were not surrendering empty territory. They represented existing communities with their own systems of governance, customary laws and proprietary relationships. The colonial State encountered an existing indigenous civilisation; that civilisation did not emerge because the State recognised it.
The historical legitimacy of the Vanua must provide the context within which contemporary constitutional safeguards are conceived. Otherwise, what existed before the State risks becoming a privilege dependent upon the goodwill of successive governments. Equal citizenship must be affirmed. But equal citizenship cannot erase prior indigenous belonging, nor should indigenous recognition diminish anyone else’s dignity. Fiji belongs to all its citizens; its indigenous foundations are an inseparable part of its constitutional inheritance.
Two Histories, One Country
Many Pasifika communities share a worldview where land is more than property. It represents ancestry, belonging and continuity. Our fellow Melanesians, Polynesians and Micronesians, have their own experiences of customary authority. Their histories are not identical to ours, but they provide a familiar language through which to understand the Vanua. Concepts such as veiwekani, veilomani and solesolevaki, express responsibilities extending beyond the individual.
But we should not romanticise these differences. Indo-Fijians also possess profound traditions of family, community, spirituality and ancestral memory. The difference is not that one community possesses culture and another does not. It is that our communities experienced Fiji’s history from different starting points.
The iTaukei experienced colonialism as an indigenous people whose homeland came under external sovereignty. Indo-Fijians experienced colonialism largely through indenture, migration, and the struggle to establish a permanent home. These experiences produced different anxieties. For iTaukei, the fear is that modern equality may become a means of diminishing indigenous identity and historical rights. For Indo-Fijians, the fear is that indigenous recognition may justify political exclusion. Neither anxiety should be dismissed.
The coups of 1987 and 2000 remain part of the Indo-Fijian historical experience and cannot be explained away by invoking the Vanua. Equally, the iTaukei experience of colonial disruption and threats to customary authority cannot be dismissed as nostalgia. We cannot demand empathy for our own history while refusing it to others.
The BLV: Beyond the Shadows of the Past
Nowhere is this misunderstanding more evident than in discussions about the Bose Levu Vakaturaga. For some Indo-Fijians, the BLV remains associated with earlier political controversies. Those concerns deserve acknowledgment. But institutions must be judged by what they are becoming, not only by what they once were.
The restored BLV operates in a different environment. Many traditional leaders today possess professional qualifications and international experience. Yet education alone does not confer wisdom. Among the iTaukei, we often hear, “Na Turaga sa mai vua na Kalou”—that chiefly authority comes from God. But chieftainship and mana must never be confused. Lineage may establish customary standing, but respect must be earned through humility, integrity and service.
The restored BLV must demonstrate independence from party politics and accountability to the Vanua. Its constitutional standing should protect its essential composition and independence from political interference, but independence must never mean immunity from scrutiny. The BLV should be a customary pillar within Fiji’s constitutional order—neither subordinate to the government of the day nor superior to the State. It must be a shield for the Vanua, not a sword against other citizens.
The Covenant Must Have Practical Meaning
Recognition cannot end with ceremonial respect. The Deed of Cession of 1874 established a relationship whose significance extends beyond the transfer of sovereignty.
Consider Queen Victoria’s undertaking conveyed to the chiefs at Nailaga in 1881 concerning customary rights over reefs—a promise that measures would be taken to secure to each mataqali, the reefs that properly belonged to it. Nearly a century later, the BLV established a committee at Tubou in 1978 to examine fishing rights and foreshore ownership. The resulting 1978-79 report concluded that existing arrangements did not adequately reflect these earlier undertakings, recommending recognition of indigenous proprietary rights over reefs and foreshore.
These are not merely episodes in colonial history. They raise an enduring question: how should historical undertakings inform the laws by which we govern today? The present legal position must be understood within that historical context. There is a difference between what the law presently provides and what historical justice may still require.
For the Vanua, land and qoliqoli are not merely economic assets. They embody responsibilities to ancestors and generations yet unborn. A distinctly Fiji democracy should be sufficiently mature to examine inherited obligations without defensiveness, and confident enough to address unresolved questions through law and justice.
A Distinctly Fiji Democracy
My years in international service taught me an enduring lesson: understanding must precede judgment. Whenever I assumed a new leadership responsibility, I first sought to understand what my predecessors had built. Leadership is about building upon foundations, not dismantling them for the satisfaction of starting afresh.
Fiji cannot construct a durable constitutional future by treating its indigenous foundations as obstacles to modernity. Equally, we cannot build national unity by expecting Indo-Fijians or other communities to accept anything less than equal dignity and protection under the law.
We need a distinctly Fiji democracy. Not chiefly rule. Not ethnic domination. Not an imported democratic template stripped of our history. Rather, a constitutional settlement combining universal rights and equal citizenship with meaningful recognition of indigenous identity and collective responsibilities.
Our political leaders must move beyond negotiating thresholds in Parliament. They must listen in villages, settlements, farms, temples, churches and mosques. Indo-Fijians should be able to understand the Vanua without feeling their citizenship is diminished. iTaukei should be able to affirm indigenous identity without questioning the legitimate belonging of fellow citizens.
Neither community should have to surrender its history to secure its future. The civic contract and the indigenous covenant need not compete. Our children should inherit a Fiji where indigenous recognition is not mistaken for discrimination, and equal citizenship is not mistaken for indigenous erasure.
We have spent too many decades speaking past each other. Perhaps it is time we began listening—not merely to answer, but to understand.
Same ocean. Same shore. Same storm. One ship. And it is time we learned to sail it together.
