In the first 50 years of colonial government, many chiefs enjoyed power in a system of indirect rule which was designed to supervise Fijians in an administrative quarantine from the plantation economy. By the 1930s this system had been wound down, and the chiefs were marginalised in local government by the extended responsibilities of British district administrators (MacNaught 1982, Norton 1990). Yet it was at this time that chiefs began, under pressure from the colonial government, to assume a place in the management of the economy.

The Australian company controlling the sugar industry was re-making its plantation proletarians into smallholder peasants under contract to supply cane to the mills. After carving its own estates into thousands of tiny tenancies, the company relied on new farmers securing leases from Fijian clans. However, this movement clashed with a growing Fijian interest in cash cropping as the government began to encourage ‘individualism…to fit the Fijian for competition with his Indian neighbour’ (Fletcher 1932).

As Fijians exploited tenant vulnerability by encouraging bribes and threatening not to renew leases, colonial officials viewed their new ‘land consciousness’ as a threat to the Indian settlers (Barton 1936). The company warned that ‘any question of control of the land situation getting into the hands of the original owners must only end in calamity for all’ (CSR 1934).2  These concerns were reinforced by the English crusader for Indian welfare and friend of Gandhi, Charles Andrews, who concluded after his 1936 visit that many Indian farmers faced dispossession, and that ‘the whole fabric of the sugar industry is in danger of collapsing’ (Andrews 1936). The sense of urgency was intensified also by pressures from the Government of India in response to demands from Gandhi’s movement.

The governor, wanting to avoid ‘an imposed solution’, was convinced that ‘the problem should be faced…while the Fijians still…rely upon their chiefs to decide for them’ (Richards 1937). Within months of Andrews’ visit, he relied on the most influential chief, Ratu Sukuna, to persuade the Council of Chiefs, and the provincial councils, to allow government to manage the leasing out of clan lands not required for members’ use. Sukuna preached to his fellow chiefs on the wisdom and morality of sharing land with the Indians from whose labour ‘much of our prosperity is derived…The owner of property has an important duty to perform…Bear in mind the story of the talents: whoever utilises what is given him will be given more. He who fails to use what he has, will lose all…It is therefore the bounden duty of landowners to utilise what they possess for the benefit of all.’ Sukuna urged an end to unethical practices that were damaging the morality and dignity of Fijians and their culture: ‘The land can only be fairly leased if this is regulated by the government…We shall receive more rents for there will be no waste land. We will live peacefully with our neighbours…and we shall have dissipated causes of evils that are now giving us a disreputable name’ (Sukuna 1936).

Sukuna warned the chiefs that if they rejected his proposal, ‘our house will be forcibly put in order [from] without’. His success in winning their assent was hailed as a breakthrough for economic development, and the chiefs were praised for their ‘act of loyalty and trust’ and their ‘statesmanlike attitude towards the general affairs of the colony’ (Barton 1936:7). Sukuna was soon conceding that in the cane areas Indian interests should be paramount (Administrative Officers’ Conference 1944). He had earlier insisted that ‘the Indian community, having shown us the way, can hardly expect to continue to hold all the land in the sugar districts where the plough mints money’ (Legislative Council Debates 1933:301).

The strongest expression of indigenous identity, chiefly leadership, had become a support for Indian prosperity. Central to this paradoxical link was the relationship the Deed of Cession had created between the chiefs and the British Crown, a bond of mutual commitment that established their collective authority in indigenous leadership, and, by binding the chiefs so strongly to the colonial state, helped to secure the Indians’ position. On Sukuna’s death, Vishnu Deo, the senior Indian political leader, lamented that ‘the Indian community had lost a very good friend’ (Fiji Times, 31 May 1958:1).

The potential conflict between the chiefs’ decision and popular Fijian opinion is reflected in protests at the time by the exiled millenarian leader Apolosi Nawai ‘The chiefs…have spoiled much of the land of their people and have given away many leases to Indians…All the good lands have been taken by Indians.’ Now, with his release impending, Apolosi sent to his expectant followers a ‘Proclamation of the New Era’, announcing momentous events to come, including the destruction of ‘the haughty chief’. He was confined to Suva and soon returned to exile.