The charter of the land : a study in the cross-fertilisation of Fijian tradition and British colonial policy

Abstract

Fijian land is registered in the names of communal units of the Fijian people under an ordinance which states that this system of tenure is in accordance with usage and tradition. The system is an emotionally charged political issue; it is regarded by Fijian politicians, who are publicly committed to its preservation, as the foundation of the Fijian social order. To enquire into the origins of that system is the object of this study. From the earliest times, the islands of the Fiji group contained a wide diversity of cultures and were the scene of unceasing inter-tribal skirmishing and a constant ebb and flow of population. The first Europeans to visit the group reported that warfare was an accepted factor in the daily lives of the indigenous people. There was, clearly, no permanent relationship between Fijians and the land across whose face they moved as the fortunes of war dictated. Nor did the white traders and missionaries who first settled in the group alter Fijian attitudes to land. Dependent as they were for survival on the goodwill of their hosts, they conformed to Fijian usages. But the many planters who arrived during the cotton boom of the 1860s brought about a revolution in those attitudes. Whereas the first settlers had cultivated small areas, casually allotted by local chiefs, whose favour was their sole security, these planters persuaded Fijians to execute formal alienations of land in exchange for European trade goods. Land came to be regarded as a saleable commodity. The introduction of European ideas of real property was followed by attempts to establish institutions which would secure planters in the possession of their purchases. Early consuls attempted to regulate land sales, and native governments were set up to protect Fijian interests, or, where European influence was predominant, to ensure that lands passed smoothly and permanently into the possession of the planters. The policy of the first colonial governor of Fiji was to return the lands to Fijian control. In asserting that the alienation was contrary to Fijian tradition, Sir Arthur Gordon was supported by the unilinear evolutionary theories of his time. These held that all primitive societies passed through identifiable stages in their progress from savagery to civilisation, and that the stage which Fiji had reached was characterised by the communal possession of inalienable rights to land. In Gordon's view, the continued existence of the Fijian race depended on the maintenance of the traditional relationship between Fijians and their land. But the early Native Lands Commissions which attempted to register land in accordance with these assumptions met with indifference and hostility. Fijians seemed to be unaware of the immemorial rights of the community, and concerned only that registration should protect the individual cultivator and his family without conferring rights on wider social groups. The attempts of the Native Lands Commission to record family ownership proved to be expensive in time and money. In the interests of economy, and to speed up the work, it was decided that an arbitrarily selected unit of the Fijian people be registered as landowner, leaving to a later date the subdivision of lands into family holdings in accordance with Fijian wishes. By the time the work was completed, however, the Fijians were facing an energetic, rapidly expanding, and land-hungry Indian population which threatened their rights in the land. They developed, in selfdefence, a hypersensitive attachment to the land tenure system imposed by government and bestowed on it the hallowed attributes of an immemorial tradition.