The Taukei movement

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Norm Dixon:
>There is even a third "government", which still seems to be pulling most
>of the strings. These are the ratbag remnants of Speight's so-called
>Taukei civilian government that are camped at  Kalabu Fijian School on
>the outskirts of Suva, near the airport town of Nausori.

Trying to understand Fiji through the bourgeois media is virtually
impossible. For example, since the crisis began there has not been a single
interview with George Speight. Nor has there been an in-depth analysis of
what he stands for. Mostly what you get is scandal-mongering or comments
about his appearance (short, bald and muscular).  The tidbit above is
fairly typical.

Nor do you get much information about the various indigenous groups and
individuals who are on the bourgeois media's shit list. Among them are the
Taukei movement, alluded to above. Let's try to put this into some kind of
context.

Turning to a 1988 Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars article titled "Two
Military Coups in Fiji" by Anthony B. van Fossen, we learn about the social
and economic conditions in West Fiji, the birthplace of the much-maligned
Taukei movement.

East Fiji is the home base of the Fijian aristocracy with its dependent
serf-like farmers. West Fiji is another kettle of fish entirely. In the
west the best land has been leased to Indians and the sugar monopoly,
leaving indigenous people underemployed and angry. Since these two groups
either lacked permanent possession of the land or viewed it in the most
commercially opportunistic manner, West Fiji has been an ecological
disaster like Haiti. There are hills and savannahs which are infertile,
eroded and ravaged by fires.

West Fijian society has also been much less stratified, relying on
religious elders rather than elites educated at Oxford or Cambridge, as is
the case in the East. Although Christianity is practiced in the west, you
also get remnants of traditional religion and beliefs. With British
annexation in 1874, eastern military expansion into the area was encouraged
and the conquered western tribes were forcibly converted to Methodism.

In response to harsh living conditions and control from the outside, the
West Fijians turned to millenarianism in the form of the Tuka movement. Not
surprisingly, this movement has many of the aspects of the Tupac Amaru
movement of the 1800s, which also combined religious iconography with
fierce anti-authoritarian beliefs. For over a century, the west has been
the primary source of indigenous Fijian radicalism, which has not really
been exploited successfully by the tepid Labour Party.

In the 1920s a commoner by the name of Apolosi Nawai emerged as the
spokesman of the West Fijian poor. He tried to form cooperatives of
indigenous farmers as a counter to both the British, the Indians and the
Eastern Fijian aristocracy. His efforts outraged the British and the
Chiefs, who exiled him twice. Not only did they resent his attempts to
create an indigenous and democratic agrarian movement, they also worried
that he would create difficulties for the gold and sugar industries, if not
endanger Allied war aims in the Pacific theater.

The Taukei movement arose in 1987, when a petition bearing 23,000
signatures was presented to the governor-general demanding Fijian
sovereignty. The petition had originated in the west. The first 14
signatures were of Tuis from Rakiraki westward around to Nadroga, the
heartland of the Tuka movement.

The leader of the movement was Apisai Tora, a blue collar worker who lived
in a small house with a tin roof. He declared, "Upon us is imposed a new
colonialism, not from outside but from within our own country by those who
arrived here with NO rights and were given full rights by the Taukei...We
cannot become strangers in our own land."

Deryck Scarr describes Apisai Tora thusly in "Fiji: Politics of Illusion":

"Tora himself had been a spokesman for the discontented west originally,
and was a Muslim convert in protest against the largely Wesleyan Fijian
establishment. . . As president of the Wholesale and Retail General Workers
Union, he had been an architect of a strike in December 1959 involving
three days of rioting in Suva that some observers thought signalled the
emergence of a multiracial working class in revolt against foreign
capital's exploitation."


Louis Proyect
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