Solomon Community Wants to Return "Home"

24 February 2009

FijiLive reported it so calmly. "A group of 28 families of Solomon Island descent want the Fiji Government to [help them or] pay their passage to the land of their forefathers if they are forcibly evicted from the land that has been their home for over a century".

Thus spoke community spokesman Josefa Selo expressing his disappointment with the Housing Authority that had issued a 30-day extension to an eviction order that will allow a housing project at Namara, Tacirua near Suva --- and see 28 families with nowhere to live. Selo said the community paid rent lease to the Fijian mataqali owning the land and was assured verbally when the lease expired that the land now belonged to the community. Informal renting by mataqali is a common, almost traditional, arrangement in many parts of urban Fiji.

There was no public outcry. No ethnic Fijian hung his head in shame. Nothing was said by those who usually condemning the Interim Government for its alleged abuses of human rights. No church bells rang in torment. The Human Rights Commission, and the Government, are yet to comment. And even General Voters leader Mike Beddoes said nothing. Why? Because the plight of the Kai Solomoni people has been going on for so long it is accepted as "normal".

This is not simply a story of 28 families but of a whole community numbering thousands that has been systematically ignored and excluded, first by the British and then by the Fijian establishment. The first indentured labourers in Fiji were not Indians as many suppose but "blackbirded" (kidnapped) young men from what are now the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, brought to Fiji in the mid-1860s to work on European cotton and copra plantations. Many died, overworked, ill-treated, and with no immunity to European diseases. Those who survived married Fijian women and today, five or more generations later and almost "pure" Fijians genetically -- and totally "pure" culturally and linguistically-- their descendants are mostly poor, marginalised people living in "informal" settlements, treated as outsiders by "pure" ethnic Fijians.

In pre-contact Fiji descent was mainly traced through the father's line but in parts of Vanua Levu and the west and centre of Viti Levu descent was traced through both parents. Today, with flexible custom frozen into rigid law, to be a Fijian one's name must be in the vola ni kawa bula, the registry kept by the Native Lands Commision. And only those with Fijian fathers -- or mothers who do not know who their child's father is! --- are registered. The children of other Fijian mothers are not considered Fijian.

So who are the Kai Solomoni and what is their rightful place in Fiji? They have no knowledge whatsoever of the islands of their paternal line and they are not accepted by their mother's line. A few have "succeeded" in mainstream Fiji but most form a distinct, poverty-striken community in a Fiji that aspires to be modern, just, democratic, non-sexist and, for many -- Christian. Why is no aspirant taking up their cause?

[Winston Halapua's Living on the Fringe: Melanesians of Fiji is a useful book for those unfamilar with the Kai Solomoni situation]