Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  Like several rulers of his age, Cakobau offered his lands to Queen Victoria. And as in many similar cases, the so-called rapacious British declined to accept the gift. So a group of thoughtful Fijians, spurred on by interested whites, offered the islands to the United States. Our Congress did not even acknowledge the offer.

  Here were islands strategically situated, rich in copra, in fruit in commercial possibilities. Ultimately, they were to become fabulously productive in sugar and gold. They were lands which permitted endless exploitation, lands destined to become the key of the South Pacific. And their king could not give them away.

  He next tried Germany, but Bismarck refused the offer. Finally, in 1874, Cakobau succeeded in forcing his islands upon Queen Victoria, who was accordingly sent the king’s war club, with which he must have dispatched hundreds of enemies before eating them. In 1931, the club was returned to Fiji, where it has become the mace of office whereby Christian law is dispensed to a very well-governed land.

  Fiji is the land of tomorrow. The International Date Line cuts through the islands, and here each new day begins. The visitor who flies from Honolulu on Sunday morning arrives in Fiji on the afternoon of the same day, Monday.

  During the war, the Navy tried to explain this to its officers, but after a few attempts, it was found that only the elite could comprehend the intricacies. The simplest explanation is this. The sun rises earlier in New York than in San Francisco; earlier in San Francisco than in Honolulu; earlier there than in Tokyo; earlier in Tokyo than in Bombay; earlier there than in Cairo; and earlier in Cairo than in London. It is obvious, therefore, that the sun must rise earlier in New York than in London. But everybody knows that it rises first in London and then in New York.

  So to end this absurdity, an arbitrary median had to be selected where a new day could begin. Fortunately, the 180th Meridian, halfway around the world from the Prime Meridian at Greenwich, cuts through the empty Pacific. So each new days starts in Fiji—actually on an island 8 degrees to the east—where the sun first rises on the British Empire.

  But the days that begin in Fiji now are not happy ones. Old promises are coming home to roost, and they are in conflict with one another, so that all groups in Fiji seem to be opposed to all other groups.

  In 1874 Lord Salisbury gave assurance that any Indian who consented to indentures for work in the cane fields of Fiji would be granted political citizenship there when the indentures were discharged. Thousands of Indians volunteered. There were Sikhs from the highlands, Madrassis from the lowlands, high- and low-caste Hindus, and even some Muslims. They were very poor, uneducated, starving, unhappy people. The good food of the cane fields made them prosper. When their servitude ended, they preferred to remain in Fiji. Some of them had been of low caste in India, even untouchable, and in Fiji caste was pretty much disregarded. Others had surrendered high caste by fleeing India and would have to undergo a long course of reinstitution if they returned. But most important, in Fiji, they had enough to eat, they had freedom, and if they were frugal, they might some day own a store.

  Indian families were tremendous. Girls married young, and if a child showed promise, it was common practice for all members of the family to sacrifice to put that one forward—as Scottish and Italian families do. Soon the Indian population leaped from one half of one per cent of the island population to more than fifty per cent. These black, aloof, suspicious, grasping, terribly capable Aryans had become the most important single element in the political, social and economic life of Fiji.

  Year Fijians Indians

  1891 105,800 7,468

  1901 94,937 17,105

  1921 84,475 60,634

  1936 97,651 85,002

  1948 est 120,000 127,000

  1980 est 140,000 205,000

  The impartial observer must admit that the Indians have earned the citizenship Lord Salisbury promised them. They have built Fiji. They made fortunes for the C.S.R. They helped start the gold fields. They swept the streets, ran the stores, made the clothes and waited the tables. In a typical year, 74% of new building was for Indian enterprises. None was for Fijian business. If Western civilization is correct in placing work above godliness, the Indians are better Westerners than either the British or the Americans. And they have produced an endless supply of new citizens, whereas the Fijian population has remained stagnant. Granted that the Indians refused to defend Fiji in war, they have defended it ably in economics, and perhaps that is what counts. The American observer in particular is loath to judge the Fiji Indians if he knows them well; they have done in Fiji what Americans have done around the world. They have worked and made things grow.

  The second promise made by the British is perhaps more embarrassing than the first. When they accepted Fiji from Cakobau, they said that they would hold the islands in trust for the Fijian owners. Certain lands—termed Crown Lands—were turned over to the Queen, but all the rest were retained by the natives. (There is argument as to when this promise of stewardship was made. Indians claim it was never made.)

  The British could not foresee, of course, that no amount of persuasion would make a Fijian labor like a slave in sugar-cane fields. “We will give you money!” the overseers said. “What for?” the Fijian asked. “So you can buy things,” the C.S.R. explained. “Don’t want nothing,” the Fijian grunted. “Ah, but when you have money, you begin to want things,” the white man insisted.

  But what could a man want that a Fijian didn’t have in his communal village? Food? It grew on trees. Clothing? A lap-lap was sufficient. And so it went. The Fijian proved the most intractable workman in the Pacific. Much addicted to walkabouts, he would disappear from the cane fields after the most solemn bargains. He was a hopeless lout, utterly uncivilized, who put pleasure and singing and drinking yaqona above ten hours of hard work a day!

  He retired to his hills and let the Indians do the work. He grew his own food and let the Chinese run the stores. He behaved himself in his own compound and let the English make a lot of laws. He wore heavy clothes, as the missionaries said, and contracted tuberculosis. He died off by the thousands from measles and small pox, and by default he turned his islands over to the Indians.

  It is a cruel trick that one land should be the common home of the most likable people on earth and some of the least likable. It is even crueler that the latter have all the attributes necessary for survival in the modern world and that the happy-go-lucky, Hiya-Joe! Fijians have so few.

  In this impasse, the British Government has unequivocally announced that they must support the Fijians. In one of the most remarkable speeches ever made by a colonial governor, Sir Brian Freeston said, “The only logical long-range solution to the basic problem of Fiji lies with the leaders of the Indian community themselves. It is for them to consider, and to educate their followers in, the existence of the inescapable dilemma. Either they will continue to multiply beyond available means of subsistence, with consequent poverty and distress; or they maintain and improve their present standard of living by a voluntary reduction in their natural rate of increase.”

  Then, lest the implication be obscure, he said, “I wish to make it perfectly clear beyond question that there can be no going back on history. There can be no departure from the pledges given to the Fijian people by Her Majesty’s Government at the time of Cession, and subsequently reaffirmed on innumerable occasions. There can be no encroachment, by legislative or any other changes, on the principle that Fijian land belongs to the Fijians and will not be taken from them.”

  Those are blunt and brave words. They have echoed around the Pacific, and the betting is three to one they cannot be enforced. A geographer who has studied this problem since 1910 says that a solution must be found within the next five years. He gives these reasons. The recent establishment of a free Indian nation has electrified Fiji’s Indians. They now have an autonomous homeland to which they can appeal. Their more fiery leaders see India as a champion of multiplying power, one that will some day surely call Britain to tas
k for not having turned Fiji over to its major population group, the Indians.

  Europeans in Fiji were therefore astounded when the London Colonial Office assented to India’s request that a Commissioner be set up in Fiji to guard the rights of all Indians not permanent residents of the islands. As might be expected, all Indians have felt that this officer—a consul in American terms—was their official representative. His arrival was the first step in the recognition of India’s paramount interest in Fiji.

  Daily exacerbations are now the rule and will increase as tempers grow thin. A white resident protests in the newspaper about the growing custom of using the prefix Mr. before Indian names. Thereupon, an Indian builder plasters an immense sign on each of his projects: “This house is being built for Mr. K.K. Chandra.” An Indian delivers a growing oration about Indian culture and claims that its masterpieces far excel Shakespeare and should be taught in Fijian schools. A young Indian graduate, burning for a white-collar job, cries, “I have only two alternatives, farming or suicide.” A descendant of Cakobau terms it effrontery for Indian politicians to harrangue their people on Cession Day—Fiji’s Fourth of July—in view of their contemptible war record. An Indian scholar states that instead of the Bible, schools could well teach the ideals of Satyam Shivam. A half-caste reports that as between the industrious Indians and the still savage Fijians who had recently rioted against some half-castes, he would take the Indians any day in the week. And underriding all of this ferment is the unquestioned fact that many Indians favor Communism and see in Russia’s advance a substitute for the Japanese thrust against British Fiji that didn’t quite come off.

  A specialist in the problem has suggested four solutions and has himself disposed of each as impractical. (1) Allow the Indians to have as many children as they want, eliminate the Fijians, and establish an Indian territory in Fiji. (“This would be criminal.”) (2) Award the Indian an equal political and educational share in the Colony and trust to his fair play not to victimize the less industrious and tenacious Fijian. (“Idealistic and wholly impractical.”) (3) Move all Indians to one of the two main islands and evacuate all Fijians to the other. (“Plan has merits, but Indians would resist like wildcats.”) (4) Repatriate the entire Indian community, with compensation to be borne as a fixed debt upon the Colony. (“Soundest solution, but would entail the complete collapse of rich Fiji’s economic structure.”)

  In short, there is no solution.

  And yet, in the days before the storm, there are few places more pleasant to visit than Fiji. It consists of some thirty main islands, of which two predominate. The largest is Viti Levu, which is about the size of Connecticut. The western half of this tropical island always surprises Americans, for it resembles Wyoming. Red hills, sweeping plateaus and outcropping mountains make it surprisingly handsome. Along the shoreline one gets a slight feeling of the tropics, for palms flourish here. This is where the sugar cane is grown, and the visitor to an island often described as primitive is astonished to find a railroad crossing and recrossing the highway. Along its small steel cradles move rich cane to the C.S.R. factories.

  Then suddenly, almost mysteriously, at about the middle of Viti Levu the climate, rainfall, vegetation and terrain change abruptly and one is no longer in dry Wyoming but in a teeming tropical jungle. Rainclouds, driven by the trade winds from the east, drop their moisture as they hit the central mountains. Rivers that look like tired dishwater wind heavily laden to the sea. Jungle plants crowd the road. Mist and storm engulf the land for days on end, and the rainfall is sometimes prodigious.

  Yet the jungle is beautiful, for flowers and strange trees abound. Most of the population lives in this rainy sector. Small fields are cleared and planted with dalo (called taro on other islands). Vegetables grow luxuriantly and there are huge banana plantations. The land is rich and productive. The only animal to cause worry is the mongoose, imported from India, which has overrun the island and which eats young chickens.

  The English, with a mania for wrong decisions in Fiji, built their capital at Suva, smack in the middle of the heaviest rainfall. Some vacationists never see the sun at Suva, while fifty miles away in either direction, sunshine abounds.

  Yet Suva is a superb tropical city. It is cleaner than Papeete, better policed, better built. It is much duller, of course, for Papeete is French, but it is superior in most services and in health. People of all races walk its streets. It has a canal that reminds one of Venice. It has brawling markets, stately banks, two movie houses, numerous churches and more taxicabs per capita—all owned by Indians—than any other city in the world.

  It is a thriving seaport, a center for heavy industry and a strong commercial city. One of its firms—there may be three others that do as well—cleared $375,000 profits in a recent year and had accumulated funds of nearly a million dollars lying idle in banks because of no place to invest them.

  Suva is also the administrative capital from which all of Britain’s islands in the Western Pacific are governed. The Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Gilbert and Ellice groups, even lonely Pitcairn are ruled from here.

  The government quarters are a pleasant surprise to most visitors. In space, appointments, landscaping and effect they excel many American state capitols. Perpetually green lawns edged with flowers and giant palms set off the buildings in which a colonial government of the poshest sort supervises an immense and watery domain.

  But for most visitors two phenomena are pre-eminent. By a strange coincidence, both the Fijians and Indians contain sects that specialize in firewalking. What they accomplish is unbelievable, but they do it. Pits of stones are brought to a white-hot state by huge wood fires beneath and over them. Then the barefooted firewalkers move deliberately and slowly across the glowing coals. After being on the fiery stones for as long as half a minute, they step out with no trace of burns or blisters.

  Skeptical whites who have stepped among the stones have been hospitalized. Several explanations have been hazarded. The one which seems most logical is that the stones are tufa, that porous volcanic rock which is sometimes seen floating on the Pacific. This tufa is so constructed that it cools incredibly rapidly, enough so that heavily calloused feet can stand the heat. The firewalkers, however, insist that they are protected by faith. Either Hinduism or Methodism suffices.

  The other memorable institution is the Grand Pacific Hotel. Run at a reputed loss by a New Zealand steamship company, it is the ultimate in tropical hotels. For $3.03 a day, it provides antique living quarters—no baths in rooms—which are kept scrupulously clean, plus three meals a day that are difficult even to describe. Dinner customarily runs to seven courses, and the guest may order as many items from each course as he wishes. The G.P.H., as it is called, is the only inexpensive thing in the tropics today.

  A white man living there and participating in the full social life of the colony would wear a dress suit three times as often as a comparable man in New York City would wear his. There is no part of Fiji which is not civilized, although bush natives prefer a more naked kind of life. It is amusing to read modern accounts of savage Fiji. If some of the things were to happen that writers describe, it is dead certain that someone would merely go to the chief’s house, lift the phone and call the police. And as likely as not, they would arrive in an Indian taxi!

  But many natives prefer to follow the old ways. On a rain-swept hillside near the center of Viti Levu is a small village in which Takala and his family have a hut. It was built years ago of coconut logs, palm matting and thatched roof. It is bound together by sennit, twisted coconut fiber strong as rope, which grows golden brown and patterned with age. The hut has three doors as required by the health ordinance and a legend that gives Takala some comfort on windy nights. In the old days, it was customary to dig the main post holes of a house very deep and then to place in each a living slave to hold the poles steady while the earth was packed in. This insured the house against hurricanes such as devastated one Fijian island recently.

  The hard
-packed floor of the hut is covered by beautifully woven mats, of which a specially handsome one is reserved as a table. There are no chairs, but beds with mosquito nettings are stacked in the corner. Takala himself has a carved log for a pillow.

  He is a Methodist and sings at the mission. His wife, whom he married when he was twenty-eight, is a devout Christian and often contributes her last penny to help starving children in China or earthquake victims in Ecuador.

  Takala has had two children. The first died with measles. The second lived for several years but contracted tuberculosis from her grandmother. This disease is almost always fatal unless cared for meticulously. Doctors and nurses have visited Takala’s village to instruct people in ways of avoiding T.B. But the villagers wear heavy clothes, get soaked in the rains, sit around telling stores, and die.

  Takala is glad he doesn’t live in Guadalcanal, where he served with the Americans. Fiji has no malaria, little elephantiasis or dengue. He tells his neighbors they’re lucky. He’s seen some bad islands.

  He does not like to work. When he joined the Army to help Beretani, he worked like a horse unloading ships; but what he preferred was jungle fighting with the Yanks. That was fun.

  Of course, he does the jobs assigned him by the chief, whose words are even more important than those of the white governor at Suva. It was funny, during the war. The white governor sent signs and speakers to the village saying that Beretani was in trouble. Fijians were needed for the Army. Nobody in Takala’s village went, because it would have been wrong to leave the fields of dalo without the chief’s permission.