For a brief time, the chiefs themselves were seen to pose the threat of disaffection. Their cooperation had become essential just as their status and authority had been greatly diminished, with some senior chiefs enduring a humiliating subordination to young European district officers. In this contradictory conjuncture, the chiefs’ grievance was redressed by a new governor who worked with Sukuna to elevate their position, in a restored system of ‘indirect rule’. In justifying this regressive move to the Colonial Office, the governor insisted that it was ‘urgently necessary to broaden the base of Native collaboration’. He warned ‘Fijians have political representation…but no direct responsibility or authority…If this does not produce irresponsible nationalism or racialism it will be surprising’ (Mitchell 1943).3 

Leading chiefs were placed in a stronger position in the state than ever before. The Council of Chiefs was made, in effect, a ‘board of directors’, controlling appointments to the Fijian Affairs Board. Sukuna became the first non-European in the colonial cabinet as executive head of a system of administration designed to confine as many Fijians as possible to a communal village life. The liberal philosophy of the 1930s had been reversed. When Sukuna was first appointed to the Legislative Council, colonial officials hoped he would help guide the Fijians in ‘their transition to individualism’ (Secretary for Native Affairs 1932). He now governed them with the conviction that they were ‘still at heart subsistence villagers’ (Norton 1990:46).

The new paternalism held contradictory meanings for the Fijian people. Many resented it for impeding free movement for work and residence. However, as Indian demographic superiority grew, and as the prospect of self-government loomed, the strength of the new institutions and of the chiefs in the state, gave them a reassuring symbolic importance. Indeed, it is one of the ironic twists of Fiji’s history that the obstacles the Fijian administration placed in the way of Fijian economic advancement, helped to strengthen anxieties which gave the system value, as a framework and symbol of ethnic solidarity and political strength, against the perceived threat from the economically more successful Indians. For Fijians the postwar era was marked by a protective fusion of chieftainship, the state, and ethnic identity.

Yet in the context of inter-ethnic relations the chiefly élite assumed an identity as mediators and conciliators, no less than as ethnic boundary markers and rallying points of ethnic solidarity. This dual identity was encouraged by the new postwar colonial ideology. The empowering of leading chiefs as a ‘corporate’ ethnic élite governing a still largely segregated Fijian populace, occurred as the British Government remade its philosophy of rule, proclaiming a mission to encourage among colonial subjects everywhere a sense of national identity in preparation for self-government.

An annual holiday was introduced to celebrate the anniversary of the chiefs’ gift of their islands to the British Crown. Until the 1950s this celebration was an affair between government and the Fijians. Now the occasion was to be commemorated ‘not as a Fijian day, but as Fiji’s day’. The Deed of Cession was made sacred as having secured peace and civilisation, marking the ancestral chiefs’ commitment to the development of Fiji as a modern nation. Cession Day, Governor Garvey declared, was to be ‘a focal point for the spirit of unity…[We] must think not as Fijians, Indians or Europeans, but as one’ (Fiji Times, 29 September 1955:4–5, 6 November 1953:4). For the first time strong official efforts were made to inculcate in Indians a sense of belonging and importance (Administrative Officers’ Conference 1953).

Chiefs in the Fijian Administration, or district officers in mainly Indian areas, assumed prominent roles in celebrations and festivals, and were drawn into relations with Indians as patrons or office-bearers in local social or sports clubs, or as chairmen of town boards. Ties between mainly Indian organisations and Fijian chiefs became important as affirmations of the growth of a multi-ethnic society. There was, in these bonds, a sense of reconciliation between the ‘foreign’ agents of economic modernity and the élite custodians of an indigenous culture and political strength upon whose goodwill all ultimately depended. Both A.D. Patel and Vishnu Deo, the principal Indian leaders, agreed that Fijian interests should be paramount in government (Legislative Council Debates 1944:44, 1946:211, 1947:112, 1948:219). What most gave significance to the process of inter-ethnic bridging were the problems of land, which, while being a chronic source of ethnic tension, also encouraged negotiation and accommodation at both the local and national levels.

Thus it is another of Fiji’s historical ironies that the immigrant Indians, emancipated from the ancient caste system, and developing an egalitarian society among themselves (Mayer 1973; Jayawardena 1975, 1980; Kelly 1991), were compelled by economic interests to come to terms with a new order of ascriptive difference and inequality—as dependent vulagi (guests) to their taukei hosts and patrons. For no other overseas Indian community did cultural and economic difference become the basis for an inter-ethnic system. The inequality in control of the means of production, and in associated forms of social deference, was offset by the material gains and by a conviction of cultural superiority. A contradiction soon emerged between the universalist egalitarian ideals adopted from Gandhi’s movement for political agitation in Fiji, and the benefits accruing to Indians from the preservation of Fijian village ‘communalism’ within the framework of chiefly authority. Land leases were readily available and cheap to the Indian farmers and shopkeepers, to the extent that the taukei owners remained docile subsistence village folk little in need of money incomes, as most did until the 1970s. In the last decades of colonial rule, paternalistic Fijian administration was effectively a subsidy to Indian peasant welfare (and CSR company profits). Indeed of all overseas Indian populations descended from indentured workers, Fiji’s has been one of the most economically successful (Subramani 1995).

The dual identity of leading chiefs as both ethnic and national figures is highlighted in the manner in which Sukuna is now revered on ‘Ratu Sukuna Day’ instigated by the Council of Chiefs several years after the army coups. The greatest chief of the colonial era is now exalted as a model of Fijian leadership for the national society, symbolising a way in which Fijian ‘tradition’ (or ‘neo-tradition’) might be incorporated into the core of a national political culture.

Sukuna represents the idealisation of high chiefs as figures of unassailable strength and dignity, representing and protecting Fijians, their land and culture in the modern world. Yet he also symbolises the role a chiefly leader should play in bridging the ethnic divide: ‘Ratu Sukuna, the man who graced a nation. This man of noble birth carried out deeds with even greater nobility, without motive against any race in Fiji’s multiracial society’ (Fiji Times, 29 May 1995:1). On Sukuna Day in 1995, as public hearings for the constitutional review began, Rabuka’s press statement intoned: ‘The unity and sanctity of traditional Fijian society was always his first and foremost interest…But at the same time it was clear to him that Fijians would have to adjust to coexistence with other communities…All share a common wish to live peacefully…and to contribute to the development of Fiji’ (Fiji Times, 29 May 1995:1).

A major outcome of the military coups has been a greater prominence of commoners in political leadership. The leading figures in Rabuka’s government have been mostly commoners, and he has often displayed charismatic authority and skill in influencing decisions of the Council of Chiefs. Yet it is also clear that in the post-coup political process the chiefs have become more significant in the national domain. The part played by the Council in the recent constitutional reform highlighted this role, and the iconic Sukuna symbolically affirms it.