Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [77]
Elsewhere in the country, long-simmering grievances between indigenous Fijians and Indians had erupted into rolling spasms of violence and intimidation. Between 1879 and 1916, more than sixty thousand Indians had arrived in Fiji as indentured laborers, recruited or tricked into coming by the British, who needed cheap labor to work on the sugar plantations. Most of their descendants still earned their living cutting sugarcane, leasing the land from the Fijians who own 87 percent of all the land in Fiji. With the coup, families who had cultivated the same plot of land for a hundred years and more were suddenly cast out of their homes, expelled from their land, and saw their belongings stripped from them, their men beaten, and their women assaulted. Overnight, Indians who had known no other land than Fiji, shopkeepers and farmers, found themselves living as refugees in their own country. In the following days, the mayhem spread. In the highlands of Viti Levu, Fijian landowners took over the Monasavu Dam, which supplied Suva and much of Fiji’s population with electricity. Increase our payments, they said, or we’ll blow it up. In Savusavu, on the island of Vanua Levu, the Air Fiji pilots were, inexplicably, taken hostage by Fijian nationalists. Turtle Island, a posh, American-owned resort in the Yasawa Islands, was seized by the indigenous landowners. The bewildered tourists were evacuated.
At the parliament, the long siege lasted fifty-six days. The president, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, who is revered in Fiji much as George Washington is in America, was compelled to resign. Elements of the Fijian military also mutinied. At the Queen Elizabeth barracks in Suva, members of the elite Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit turned on the soldiers who remained loyal to the government, killing four of them.
The repercussions of the coup were playing out as we arrived in Fiji. George Speight was eventually arrested and accused of treason. The Indian-led government he deposed, however, was not permitted to return to power. The chiefs in Fiji, who, despite an elected parliament, remained the true power in Fiji, appointed a caretaker government. Many of those presumed to have played a role in the coup found themselves posted to Fijian embassies abroad, as well as to the U.N. in New York.
Suva remained littered with the blackened shells of buildings torched during the looting that followed the coup. Police checkpoints had been set up on all the roads leading into town. And yet, as we began to settle in, a veneer of normalcy had returned to the city. The curfews had been lifted. Classes had resumed at the University of the South Pacific. Even the tourists were beginning to return to the sunny side of Fiji after the resorts slashed their prices.
As we ambled past the derelict hulk of the Pacific Grand Hotel, idly talking about what, precisely, I knew about the friendliness of the women of Suva, we noticed a Fijian man frantically beckoning us from across the road.
“I am Ahanda,” he said once we had crossed the street. “This means Henry Cooper in English.”
All right, we thought. Technically, my name could be translated as Johnny Comfort.
Ahanda was a security guard at the Pacific Grand Hotel. He had called out to us because he wanted to say hi. This was unusual in Fiji. Fijian men tend to be reserved, even rather regal in their bearing. They’re not unfriendly, just inclined toward the formal.