Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [96]
“Yes, Cakaudrove. Then there is Bua and Taveuni. Taveuni is where the high chief is from.”
All coup support areas.
“So you have a chiefly system here,” I said. I found it helpful to feign ignorance, though often enough, it wasn’t much of a feint. The Fijian chiefly system was exasperatingly complex. Even the president of the Great Council of Chiefs, the chief chief, if you will, had recently had to plead his case to a special tribunal of chiefs when he attempted to claim a particular title. A chiefly cousin had also claimed the title. It took months of painstaking research into their respective lineages before the tribunal decided in the chief chief’s favor. This was no small matter, however. An air of latent violence had hung in the air in Fiji as the chiefs sorted through the dispute.
Of course, I wasn’t the only foreigner who had trouble understanding chiefly ways in Fiji. Sylvia’s boss, Rex, had once recounted the story of a freshly arrived diplomat from England.
“She had arrived at a kava ceremony for a chief taking a new title, a very important ceremony,” Rex told us. “Well, this English diplomat is talking and talking to the other diplomats, and she sees this bure—a ceremonial meeting hall—with sides that hang nearly to the ground. She sees all these shoes on the outside, so she takes her shoes off, and as she steps inside she sees in front of the chief a big bowl of what looks like muddy water.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yes. The kava. She walks up to it, dips her feet into it, and begins to wash her feet in the kava. A week later, she was reassigned to another country.”
Fijians, as I had already learned, do not have a sense of humor when it comes to their chiefs.
“Yes, we have chiefs here,” Bill continued. “Ratus.”
“What if you have a bad chief?” I asked. “Can the people do anything about it?”
“It is not the Fijian way.”
Which, in my humble opinion, is a problem. George Speight had been a mere front man, the public face of the coup. No commoner in Fiji could topple a democratically elected government without the consent of a few powerful chiefs.
“The problem,” Bill said, looking me in the eye, “is Western influence.”
Oh, well then. Bill was frisky. And which Western influences would those be? Democracy? As a Westerner, I will take the blame for global warming, third-world debt, rising sea levels, war—the big ones, in any case—and Britney Spears. But I don’t think that’s what Bill had in mind. It raised my hackles. But then I thought about it for a moment, and I had to concede that to a certain degree he was right. The chiefly system that exists today is in fact a legacy of colonial English rule. It was the colonists who created the Great Council of Chiefs to further English power. Today, it is often referred to as the Great Council of Thieves. The chiefly system in Fiji was, at worst, a rapacious kleptocracy and, at best, a stubborn, ill-serving adherence to a colonial era that has long since vanished.
And yet, though colonialism and modernity had changed Fiji, the chiefs still fought the battles of yore. There are three traditional chiefly confederations in Fiji, and the coup can best be understood as a battle among the confederations for preeminence. Racial tensions were not so much a cause of the coup as a weapon the chiefs could use to further their ends. George Speight found himself isolated on Nukulau Island not because he overthrew an Indian-led government but because his actions had forced the resignation of Fiji’s president, Ratu Mara, a preeminent chief. Speight would not have survived a day if he had been placed inside the Suva Prison. The Fijian prisoners who were loyal to Ratu Mara would have killed him in an instant.
I asked Bill what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.
“No problem,” he said. “It was very quiet.”
SAVUSAVU WAS A PLACE to disappear. It was far away. It was uncrowded. It was lush and beautiful. It even smelled nice, with the scent of bougainvillea and hibiscus wafting through the sea air. The town itself wasn’t much to look at. It