In Fiji, “communalism” haunts our public square like a ghost at the feast. Urban, multiracial progressives invoke it with a shudder. For many Indo-Fijians, it still smells of the 1987 coups, the 1990 constitution, and the fear that in a crisis, blood will outrank citizenship.
But here is a hard truth: communalism in Fiji is not fading. For the iTaukei, it is not a political slogan. It is a philosophy of survival, identity and dignity. To demand that we abandon our communal framework is to ask us to cease being iTaukei. That is neither realistic nor just.
So the real question is not whether communalism should exist. It is whether Indo-Fijians can learn to read it correctly—not as a threat, but as a different grammar of belonging.
Anger is not the enemy
In March 2008, during a firestorm over his pastor’s sermons, Barack Obama did something rare. He did not simply condemn the anger. He traced its roots: generations of racism and neglect, but also the resentment of working-class whites watching their jobs disappear.
“The anger is real,” Obama said. “To simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only widens the chasm of misunderstanding.”
Fiji can learn here. Indo-Fijian anger over coups and being treated as permanent outsiders—that is real. iTaukei anger over land alienation, cultural erosion and feeling like strangers in our own home—that is also real. No constitution or national slogan can wish either away.
What communalism actually is
Forget the caricature of a nationalist plot. For an iTaukei villager in Ba or Cakaudrove, communalism is the daily reality of veilomani (mutual care), solesolevaki (shared labour) and veivuke (assistance). It is the mataqali holding together families who have tilled the same soil for generations. It is the yavusa deciding together whether to lease land to a sugar farmer or reforest a watershed.
When iTaukei speak of land or taukei, they are not talking about Western property deeds. They mean Vanua—land, people, custom, ancestors. To be iTaukei is to stand within a web of obligation, never alone before the state.
What iTaukei communalism seeks is recognition: that our ancestral way of life deserves a place alongside the individualist, market logic that arrived with colonialism and sugar, and is now embedded in our imposed 2013 constitution.
Why Indo-Fijians misread it
That misunderstanding is understandable. Indo-Fijians came as girmitiyas (1879–1920), their communal bonds deliberately broken by the plantation system. They rebuilt—through panchayats, temples, sangams—but those bonds were voluntary, not ancestral birthrights.
Today, Indo-Fijians feel they do not fully belong, yet hold overwhelming economic power. The honest question is: are they willing to share that power in a way that embraces being Fijian in the deeper iTaukei sense? Meanwhile, iTaukei have seen their land and culture stripped away.
Neither grievance cancels the other. As Obama said: “We can condemn a statement without condemning the person. We can acknowledge the pain of a community without endorsing every word spoken in that pain.”
Three things thoughtful understanding means
Understanding iTaukei communalism does not mean accepting racial discrimination or scrapping the common roll. It means three things.
First, it is defensive, not aggressive. The driving fear is that globalisation, land sales, tourism and climate displacement will erase the Vanua. When an iTaukei elder defends communal land, he is not plotting to expel tenants. He is trying to stop his grandchildren from selling ancestral soil for a resort and a second-hand SUV. Indo-Fijians, with no ancestral land base, can afford to see land as a commodity. iTaukei cannot.
Second, communalism and multiracial democracy can co-exist—with new institutions. Fiji has never genuinely tried a power-sharing model: iTaukei communal representation alongside common-roll seats, with iTaukei vetoes on culture and land. Instead, we swung from iTaukei-dominated ethnocracy (1987–2006) to a “one man, one vote” system (2013 onward) that many iTaukei see as imposed without addressing our existential anxiety. A thoughtful Indo-Fijian might ask: Is there a middle way that protects my vote and their Vanua?
Third, iTaukei communalism holds wisdom Indo-Fijians may need. The climate crisis will devastate our coasts and sugar belts. Individualist solutions—buying higher ground, insuring alone—will fail. Survival requires veivuke: collective decisions on relocation, resource sharing, mutual obligation. iTaukei have done this for centuries. Our communal structures could become Fiji’s resilience architecture. Dismiss them as backward, and you walk away from a toolkit that might save your grandchildren.
The path forward
Obama ended his Philadelphia speech with this: “I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle. But I do believe that we can get beyond them if we work together.” The Bose Levu Vakaturaga (BLV) believes it is possible. In intergenerational terms.
No one is asking Indo-Fijians to stop being Indo-Fijian. No one is asking iTaukei to stop being iTaukei. We are asked only to stop seeing each other’s communalism as a zero-sum threat.
When an iTaukei speaks of Vanua, hear “home”, not “hierarchy”. When an Indo-Fijian speaks of enterprise, hear “aspiration”, not “greed”. These translations are hard. They require humility and discomfort.
But the alternative is what Fiji has known too long: a politics of mutual suspicion, each community waiting for the other to weaken. That is not a nation. That is a ceasefire.
The BLV could be one space for translation. A reformed parliament with genuine communal and individual protections could be another. But no institution works if the heart is unwilling—if we refuse to see, as Obama put it, that “we may have come on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now.”
Indo-Fijians do not need to embrace communalism. They need to understand it—as a living, wounded, hopeful expression of iTaukei humanity. In that understanding, perhaps discover that their own survival is not separate from the survival of the Vanua.
Same ocean. Same shore. Same storm. Same boat
The difficulties will pass. But only if we stop rowing against each other, and start rowing toward the same horizon.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 