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THE FIJIANS
A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF CUSTOM
[Illustration: BREADFRUIT.]
THE FIJIANS
A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF CUSTOM
BY
BASIL THOMSON
AUTHOR OF "THE STORY OF DARTMOOR PRISON," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1908
_OTHER WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_South Sea Yarns_
_The Diversions of a Prime Minister_
_A Court Intrigue_
_The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath_
_Savage Island_
_The Story of Dartmoor Prison_
(_In collaboration with_ Lord Amherst of Hackney)
_The Discovery of the Solomon Islands_
_Copyright, London 1908, by William Heinemann._
PREFACE
This volume does not pretend to be an exhaustive monograph on the
Fijians. Their physical characteristics and their language, which have
no bearing upon the state of transition from customary law to modern
competition, are omitted, since they may be studied in the pages of
Williams, Waterhouse and Hazlewood, which the author has freely
consulted. All that is aimed at is a study of the decay of custom in a
race that is peculiarly tenacious of its institutions--the decay that
has now set in among the natural races in every part of the globe.
The author lived among the Fijians with short intervals for ten years,
first as Stipendiary Magistrate in various parts of the group, then as
Commissioner of the Native Lands Court, and finally as Acting Head of
the Native Department. Much of the anthropological information was
collected for the Commission appointed in 1903 to investigate the causes
of the decrease of the natives, of which the author was a member, and of
that portion of the book his fellow-Commissioner, Dr. Bolton Glanvill
Corney, C.M.G., and the late Mr. James Stewart, C.M.G., should be
considered joint authors, though they are not responsible for the
conclusions drawn from the evidence.
To Dr. Corney, whose services to medical science in the investigation of
leprosy and tropical diseases in the Pacific are so widely known, his
special thanks are due. He also received valuable assistance from Dr.
Lynch, the late Mr. Walter Carew and a number of native assistants,
notably Ilai Motonithothoka, Ratu Deve, the late Ratu Nemani Ndreu, and
others. The late Mr. Lorimer Fison also helped him with many
suggestions.
The ideas expressed in the introduction were formulated in the author's
presidential address to the Devonshire Association in 1905: the marriage
system and the mythology were described in papers read before the
Anthropological Institute: some account of the "Path of the Shades" and
the fishing of the Mbalolo are to be found in others of the author's
books.
The spelling adopted for native words may be displeasing to Fijian
scholars, particularly the rendering of _q_ by _nk_, but although
_wanka_ may not represent the Fijian pronunciation as accurately as
_wangga_, it is certainly less uncouth. Hazelwood's spelling, excellent
as it is for the purpose of teaching Fijians to read and write their own
language, is misleading to English readers, and the abandonment of his
consonants _c_ for _th_, _b_ for _mb_, _d_ for _nd_ and _g_ for _ng_,
needs no apology.
_London, 1908._
INTRODUCTION
The present population of the globe is believed to be about fifteen
hundred millions, of which seven hundred millions are nominally
progressive and eight hundred millions are stagnant under the law of
custom. It is difficult to choose terms that even approach scientific
accuracy in these generalizations, for, as Mr. H.G. Wells has remarked,
if we use the word "civilized" the London "Hooligan" and the "Bowery
tough" immediately occur to us; if the terms "stagnant" or
"progressive," how are the Parsee gentleman and the Sussex farm labourer
to be classed? Nor can the terms "white" and "coloured" be used, for
there are Chinese many shades whiter than the Portuguese. But as long as
the meaning is clear the scientific accuracy of terms is unimportant,
and so for convenience we will call all races of European descent
"civilized," and races living under the law of custom "uncivilized." The
problem that will be solved within the next few centuries is--What part
is to be taken in the world's affairs by the eight hundred millions of
uncivilized men who happen for the moment to be politically inferior to
the other seven hundred millions?
For centuries they have been sleeping. Under the law of custom, which no
man dares to disobey, progress was impossible. The law of custom was the
law of our own forefathers until the infusion of new blood and new
customs shook them out of the groove and set them to choosing between
the old and the new, and then to making new laws to meet new needs. This
happened so long ago that if it were not for a few ceremonial survivals
we might well doubt whether our forefathers were ever so held in
bondage. With the precept--to do as your father did before you--an
isolated race will remain stationary for centuries. There is, I
believe, in all the history of travel, only one instance in which the
absolute stagnation of a race has been proved, and that is the case of
the Solomon Islands, the first of the Pacific groups to be discovered,
and the last to be influenced by Europeans. In 1568 a Spanish expedition
under Alvaro de Mendana set sail from Peru in quest of the Southern
continent. Missing all the great island groups Mendana discovered the
islands named by him Islas de Saloman, not because he found any gold
there, but because he hoped thereby to inflame the cupidity of the
Council of the Indies into fitting out a fresh expedition. Gomez
Catoira, his treasurer, has left us a detailed account of the customs of
the natives and about forty words of their language. And now comes the
strange part of the story. Expedition after expedition set sail for the
Isles of Solomon; group after group was discovered; but the Isles of
Solomon were lost, and at last geographers, having shifted them to every
space left vacant in the chart, treated them as fabulous and expunged
them altogether. They were rediscovered by Bougainville exactly two
centuries later, but it was not until late in the nineteenth century
that any attempt was made to study the language and customs of the
natives. It was then found that in every particular, down to the
pettiest detail in their dress, their daily life and their language,
they were the same as when Catoira saw them two centuries earlier, and
so no doubt they would have remained until the last trump had not
Europeans come among them.
If, as there is good reason for believing, the modern Eskimo are the
lineal descendants of the cave men of Derbyshire, who hunted the
reindeer and the urus in Pleistocene times, the changelessness of their
habits is to be ascribed to the same cause--the absence of a stimulus
from without to break down the law of custom.
In the sense that no race now exists which is not in some degree touched
by the influence of Western civilization, the present decade may be said
to be a fresh starting-point in the history of mankind. Whithersoever we
turn, the laws of custom, which have governed the uncivilized races for
countless generations, are breaking down; the old isolation which kept
their blood pure is vanishing before railway and steamship communication
which imports alien labourers to work for European settlers; and
ethnologists of the future, having no pure race left to examine, will
have to fall back upon hearsay evidence in studying the history of human
institutions.
All this has happened before in the world's history, but in a more
limited area. To the Roman armies, the Roman system of slave-owning, and
still more to the Roman roads, we owe the fact that there is not in
Western Europe a single race of unmixed blood, for even the Basques, if
they are indeed the last survivors of the old Iberian stock, have
intermarried with the French and Spanish people about them. An
ethnologist of the eighth century, meditating on the wave upon wave of
destructive immigration that submerged England, might well have doubted
whether so extraordinary a mixture of races could ever develop
patriotism and pride of race, and yet it did not take many centuries to
evolve in the English a sense of nationality with insular prejudice
superadded. Nationality and patriotism are in fact purely artificial and
geographical sentiments. We feel none of the bitter hate of our Saxon
forefathers for their Norman conquerors; the path of our advance through
the centuries is strewn with the corpses of patriotisms and race
hatreds.
Nor was the mixture of races in Europe the mere mingling of peoples
descended from a common Aryan stock, for if that were so, what has
become of the Persians and Egyptians, worshippers of AEon and Serapis and
Mithras, who garrisoned the Northumberland wall; of the host of Asiatic
and African soldiers and slaves scattered through Europe during the
Roman Empire; of the Negroes introduced into southern Portugal by Prince
Henry the Navigator; of the Jews that swarmed in every medieval city; of
the Moors in southern Spain? Did none of these intermarry with Aryans,
and leave a half-caste Semitic or Negro or Tartar progeny behind them?
How otherwise can one account for the extraordinary diversity in skull
measurement, in proportion and in colour which is found in the
population of every European country?
If we except the inhabitants of remote islands probably there has never
been an unmixed race since the Palaeolithic Age. Long before the dawn of
history kingdoms rose and fell. Broken tribes, fleeing from invaders,
put to sea and founded colonies in distant lands. Troy was no exception
to the rule of the old world that at the sack of every city the men were
slain and the women reserved to be the wives of their conquerors.
Doubtless it was to keep the Hebrew blood pure that Saul was commanded
to slay "both man and woman, infant and suckling" of the Amalekites, the
ancestors of the Bedawin of the Sinai peninsula.
It may be argued that the laws of custom have been swept away by
conquering races many times in the world's history without any
far-reaching consequences--those of the Neolithic people of the long
barrows by the warriors of the Bronze Age; those of the British by the
Romans; those of the Romano-British by the Saxons; those of the Saxons
by the Normans. But there was this difference: in all these cases the
new customs were forced upon the weaker race by the strong hand of its
conquerors, and as it had obeyed its own laws through fear of the
Unseen, so it adopted the new laws through fear of its new masters. It
was a rough, but in the end a wholesome schooling. We go another way to
work: we do not as a rule come to native races with the authority of
conquerors; we saunter into their country and annex it; we break down
their customs, but do not force them to adopt ours; we teach them the
precepts of Christianity, and in the same breath assure them that
instead of physical punishment by disease which they used to fear, their
disobedience will be visited by eternal punishment after death--a
contingency too remote to have any terrors for them; and then we leave
them like a ship with a broken tiller free to go whithersoever the wind
of fancy drives them, and it is not surprising that they prefer the easy
vices of civilization to its more difficult virtues. In civilizing a
native race the _suaviter in modo_ is a more dangerous process than the
_fortiter in re_.
The law of custom is always interwoven with religion, and is enforced by
fear of earthly punishment for disobedience. This fear is strongest
among patriarchal races whose religion is founded upon the worship of
ancestors. To depart from the customs of the ancestors is to insult the
tribal god, and it is therefore the business of each member of the tribe
to see to it that the impiety of his fellow-tribesmen brings no judgment
down upon his head. In such a community a man is only free from the
tyranny of custom when he dies. As in the German's ideal of a
well-governed city, everything is forbidden. Hedged about by the tabu he
can scarce move hand or foot without circumspection. If he errs, even
unwittingly, the spirits of disease pounce upon him. In Tonga almost
every day he performed the _Moe-moe_, an act of penance to atone for
unconscious breaches of the tabu, and in the civil war of 1810 it was
the practice to open the bodies of the slain to discover from the state
of the liver whether the dead warrior had led a good or an evil life.
Among the races held in bondage by custom there were, of course, rare
souls born before their time in whom the eternal "Thou shalt not" of the
law of custom provoked the question "Why?" But they met the fate
ordained for men born before their time; in civilized states the
hemlock, the cross and the stake; in uncivilized, the club or the spear.
Perhaps the real complaint of the Athenians against Socrates was that an
unceasing flow of wisdom and reproof is more than erring man can endure,
but the published grounds for his condemnation were that he denied the
gods recognized by the State, and that he corrupted the young. This, as
William Mariner tells us, is what men whispered under their breath when
Finau, the king of Vavau in the Friendly Islands, dared to scoff at the
law of tabu in 1810, and he was struck down by sickness while ordering a
rope to be brought for the strangling of his priest. In fact the
reformers of primitive races never lived long: if they were low-born
they were clubbed and that was the end of them and their reforms; if
they were chiefs, and something happened to them, either by disease or
accident, men saw therein the finger of an offended deity, and obedience
to the existing order of things became stronger than before.
The decay of custom, which may be fraught with momentous consequences
for the civilized races, is proceeding more rapidly every year. It can
best be studied by examining the process in a single race in detail, and
for this purpose the Fijians, who are the subject of this volume, are
peculiarly suited, because by their isolation through many centuries no
foreign ideas, filtering through neighbouring tribes, had corrupted
their customary law before Europeans came among them, and so decay set
in with startling suddenness despite their innate conservatism. What is
true of the Fijians is true, with slight modifications, of every
primitive society in Asia, Africa and America which is being dragged
into the vortex of what we call progress. The fabric of every complete
social system has been built up gradually. You may raze it to the
foundations and erect another in its place, but if you pull out a stone
here and there the whole edifice comes tumbling about your ears before
you can make your alterations. It is the fashion to assert that native
races begin to decline as soon as Europeans come into contact with them.
This arises from our evil modern habit of making false generalizations.
The fact that some isolated races suddenly torn from the roots of their
ancient customs begin by decreasing rapidly is so dramatic that we
eagerly fasten on the generalization that weaker races are doomed to
wither away at the coming of the all-conquering European, forgetting the
steady increase of the Bantu races in Africa, and of the Indians and
Chinese up to and even beyond the limit of population which their
country can support.
The main cause of the sudden decrease of a race is the introduction of
new diseases which assume a more virulent aspect when they strike root
in a virgin soil, but we are now beginning to learn that this cause is
only temporary. For a time a race seems to sicken and pine like an
individual, but like an individual it may recover. In the decrease from
disease there seems to be a stopping-place. It may come when the race
has been reduced to one-fifth of its number, like the Maoris, or to a
mere handful like the blacks of New South Wales, but there comes a time
when decay is arrested, and then perhaps fusion with another race has
set in. The type may be lost, but the blood remains.
It is against the attacks of new diseases that the law of custom is most
helpless. The primitive theory of disease and death is so widespread
that we may accept it as the belief of mankind before custom gave place
to scientific inquiry. The primitive argument was this: the natural
state of man is to be healthy, and everything contrary to Nature must be
the doing of some hostile agency. When a man feels ill he knows that an
evil spirit has entered into him, and since evil spirits do not move
unless some person conjures them, his first thought on waking with a
headache is "An enemy hath done this." Out of this springs all the
complicated ritual of witchcraft, fetish and juju, which by frightening
natives into destroying or burying all offal and refuse that might be
used against them by a wizard, achieves the right thing for the wrong
reason. The "Evil spirit" theory of disease is thus not so very far
removed from the bacillus theory: in both the body has been attacked by
a malignant visitor which must be expelled before the patient can
recover. It is in the methods adopted for making the body an
uncomfortable lodging for it that the systems diverge. In all ages the
essential part of therapeutics has been faith in the remedy, whether in
the verse of the Koran swallowed by the Moslem, in the charm prescribed
by the medieval quack, in the "demonstration" of the Christian
Scientist, in the prescription of the medical practitioner. Mankind
survives its remedies as well as its epidemics. England has a population
of nearly forty millions, even though, less than a century ago, as we
learn from Creevy's memoirs, blood-letting was regarded as the proper
treatment for advanced stages of consumption.
It is, I think, safe to assume that in the centuries to come there will
be representatives even of the smallest races now living on the earth,
and that the proportions between civilized and what are now uncivilized
peoples will not have greatly altered, though the political and social
ideas which underlie Western civilization will have permeated the whole
of mankind. It is therefore important to inquire whether the
uncivilized races are really inferior in capacity to Europeans.
Professor Flinders Petrie has expressed the view that the average man
cannot receive much more knowledge than his immediate ancestors, and
that "the growth of the mind can in the average man be but by fractional
increments in each generation." In support of this view he declares that
the Egyptian peasant who has been taught to read and write is in every
case which he has met with "half-witted, silly and incapable of taking
care of himself," while the Copt, whose ancestors have been scribes for
generations, can be educated without sustaining any mental injury. I
venture to think that there are more exceptions than will prove any such
rule. In New Zealand it has been found that Maori children, when they
can be induced to work, are quite equal to their white school-fellows.
Fijian boys educated in Sydney have been proved to be equal to the
average; Tongan boys who have never left their island write shorthand
and solve problems in higher mathematics; Booker Washington and Dubois
are only two out of a host of negroes of the highest attainments.
Australian aborigines, and even Andaman Islanders, have shown some
aptitude when they have overcome the difficulty of a common language
with their teacher; New Guinea children do very well in the mission
schools. The Masai are the most backward of all the East African tribes,
yet Mr. Hollis, the Government Secretary of Uganda, employs two Masai
boys to develop his photographs. It is, in fact, doubtful whether there
is any race of marked mental inferiority, though, as among ourselves,
there are thick-witted individuals, and these may be more common in one
race than in another. Certainly there is no race that suffers mental
injury from teaching. In all uncivilized people there is a lack of
application, and any injury they sustain arises from the confinement
necessary for study. It is character rather than intellect that achieves
things in this world, and character is affected by education, by
climate, and by pressure of circumstances. There are now in almost every
uncivilized race individuals who are defying the law of custom to their
material profit, though not to their entire peace of mind, for they have
begun to understand that the riches of the European may be dearly
purchased, and that in anxiety about many things happiness and
contentment are not often found.
But though all peoples are teachable there are racial idiosyncrasies
which we are only beginning to discover. Why, for instance, should the
Hausa and the Sudanese have a natural aptitude for European military
discipline while the Waganda find it irksome? Why do the Masai, whose
social development is Palaeolithic in its simplicity, make trustworthy
policemen and prison warders, while the Somalis have been found utterly
worthless in both capacities? Why are the Maoris and Solomon Islanders
natural artists in wood-carving while the tribes most nearly allied to
them are almost destitute of artistic skill? These natural aptitudes
suggest what these races may become when we have struck off their
fetters of custom and have forced them to compete with us.
Cheap and rapid means of transit are sweeping away the distinctions of
dress, of custom, and, to some extent, of language, which underlie the
feeling of nationality, and the races now uncivilized will soon settle
for themselves the vital question whether they are to remain hewers of
wood and drawers of water for the white man, or whether they are to take
their place in free competition with him. The "Yellow Peril," which
implies national cohesion among the Mongolians, may be a chimera, but it
is impossible to believe that a white skin is to be for ever a sort of
patent of nobility in the world state of the future.
History teaches us that there can be no middle course. Either race
antipathy and race contempt must disappear, or one breed of men must
dominate the others. The psychology of race contempt has never been
dispassionately studied. It is felt most strongly in the United States
and the West Indies; a little less strongly in the other British
tropical colonies. In England it is sporadic, and is generally confined
to the educated classes. It is scarcely to be noticed in France, Spain,
Portugal or Italy. From this it might be argued that it is peculiar to
races of Teutonic descent were it not for the fact that Germans in
tropical countries do not seem to feel it. It is, moreover, a sentiment
of modern growth. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Englishmen
did not regard coloured people as their inferiors by reason of the
colour of their skin. It appears, in fact, to date only from the time of
slavery in the West Indian colonies, and yet the Romans, the Spaniards,
and the Portuguese, who were the greatest slave-owners in history, never
held marriage with coloured people in contempt. The only race hatred in
the Middle Ages was anti-Semitic, and this was due to the Crusader
spirit. The colour line, as it is called, is drawn more firmly by men
than by women, and deep-seated as it is in the Southern States just now
it may be nothing more than a passing phase of sentiment, a subconscious
instinct of self-preservation in a race which feels that its old
predominance is threatened by equality with its former servants. If you
analyze the sentiment it comes to this. You may tolerate the coloured
man in every relation but one: you may converse with him, eat with him,
live with him on terms of equality, but your gorge rises at the idea of
admitting him to become a member of your family by marriage. In the
ordinary social relations you do not take him quite seriously; if he is
a commoner you treat him as your potential servant; if a dusky potentate
you yield him a sort of jesting deference; but in that one matter of
blood alliance with him you will always keep him at arm's length. That
is the view even of the Englishman who has not lived in a black man's
country, and upon that is built the extraordinary race hatred of the
Southern States, where a white man will not consent to sit in a tramcar
with a negro, though the white man be a cotton operative and the negro a
University professor.
If this race contempt were a primitive instinct with the white race the
future of mankind would be lurid indeed, for it is impossible to believe
that one half of humanity can be kept for ever inferior to the other
without deluging the world with blood. But it is not a primitive
instinct. Shakespeare saw nothing repulsive in the marriage of Desdemona
with a man of colour. Early in the sixteenth century Sieur Paulmier de
Gonneville of Normandy gave his heiress in marriage to Essomeric, the
son of a Brazilian chief, and no one thought that she was hardly
treated. It may not be a pleasant subject to dwell upon, but it is a
fact that women of Anglo-Saxon blood do, even in these days, mate with
Chinese, Arabs, Kaffirs, and even Negroes despite the active opposition
of the whole of their relations. History is filled with romantic
examples of the marriage of European men with native women, to cite no
more than de Bethencourt with the Guanche princess; Cortes with his
Mexican interpreter; John Rolfe with Pocahontas.
It is the fashion to describe the half-caste offspring of such mixed
marriages as having all the vices of both races, and none of the
virtues. In so far as this accusation is true it is accounted for by the
social ostracism in which these people are condemned to live. Disowned
by their fathers, freed by their parentage from the restraints under
which their mothers' people are held in check, it could scarcely be
otherwise, but those who have lived with half-castes of many races will
agree that in intellectual aptitude and in physical endowment they are
generally equal to the average of Europeans when they have the same
education and opportunities, and that there is no physical deterioration
in the offspring of the marriages of half-castes _inter se_.
At the dawn of this twentieth century we see the future of mankind
through a glass darkly, but if we study the state of the coloured people
who are shaking themselves free from the law of custom, we may see it
almost face to face. Race prejudice does not die as hard as one would
think. The Portuguese of the sixteenth century were ready enough to
court as "Emperor of Monomotapa" a petty Bantu chieftain into whose
power they had fallen; and the English beachcomber of the forties who,
when he landed, called all natives "niggers" with an expletive prefix,
might very soon be found playing body-servant to a Fijian chief, who
spoke of him contemptuously as "My white man." In tropical countries the
line of caste will soon cease to be the colour line. There, as in
temperate zones, wealth will create a new aristocracy recruited from men
of every shade of colour. Even in the great cities of Europe and
America we may find men of Hindu and Chinese and Arab origin controlling
industries with their wealth, as Europeans now control the commerce of
India and China, but with this difference--that they will wear the dress
and speak the language which will have become common to the whole
commercial world, and as the aristocracy of every land will be composed
of every shade of colour, so will be the masses of men who work with
their hands. In one country the majority of the labourers will be black
or brown; in another white; but white men will work cheek by jowl with
black and feel no degradation. There will be the same feverish pursuit
of wealth, but all races will participate in it instead of a favoured
few. The world will then be neither so pleasant nor so picturesque a
place to live in, and by the man of that age the twentieth century will
be cherished tenderly as an age of romance, of awakening, and of high
adventure. The historians of that day will speak of the Victorian age as
we speak of the Elizabethan, and will date the new starting-point in the
history of mankind from the decay of the law of custom.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. THE TRANSITION 1
II. THE AGE OF MYTH 4
III. THE AGE OF HISTORY 21
IV. CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY 56
V. WARFARE 85
VI. CANNIBALISM 102
VII. RELIGION 111
VIII. POLYGAMY 172
IX. FAMILY LIFE 175
X. THE MARRIAGE SYSTEM 182
XI. CUSTOMS AT BIRTH 206
XII. CIRCUMCISION AND TATTOOING 216
XIII. THE PRACTICE OF PROCURING ABORTION. 221
XIV. THE INSOUCIANCE OF NATIVE RACES 228
XV. SEXUAL MORALITY 233
XVI. EPIDEMIC DISEASES 243
XVII. LEPROSY (_VUKAVUKA_ OR _SAKUKA_) 255
XVIII. YAWS (_THOKO_) 270
XIX. TUBERCULOSIS 277
XX. TRADE 280
XXI. NAVIGATION AND SEAMANSHIP 290
XXII. PHYSICAL POWERS 297
XXIII. ATTITUDES AND MOVEMENTS 299
XXIV. TRAITS OF CHARACTER 304
XXV. SWIMMING 316
XXVI. FISHING 320
XXVII. GAMES 328
XXVIII. FOOD 334
XXIX. YANKONA (_KAVA_) 341
XXX. TOBACCO 352
XXXI. THE TENURE OF LAND 354
XXXII. CONCLUSION 387
INDEX 391
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BREADFRUIT _Frontispiece_
DESCENDANTS OF TONGAN IMMIGRANTS PERFORMING THE TONGAN DANCE _LAKALAKA_
_To face page_ 22
BRINGING FIRST FRUITS TO MBAU " 60
BUILDING A CHIEF'S HOUSE " 70
SPOIL FROM THE PLANTATIONS--(TARO, COCOANUTS AND YANGKONA) " 78
PAINTING A _TAPA_ SHROUD " 130
SERUA, AN ISLAND CHIEF VILLAGE IN THE _MBAKI_ COUNTRY " 154
THE MBURE-NI-SA (CLUB HOUSE) " 176
WOMEN FISHING WITH THE SEINE " 212
A WAR DANCE " 286
THE _THAMAKAU_ " 290
THE HAIR PLASTERED WITH BLEACHING LIME " 302
THE CHIEF'S TURTLE FISHERS " 320
SLAUGHTERING THE TURTLE " 326
BREWING YANGKONA " 344
PICKING COCOANUTS " 364
_Photographs by_ Waters, _Suva, Fiji_.
THE FIJIANS
CHAPTER I
THE TRANSITION
The Fijian of to-day is neither savage nor civilized. Security from
violence has fostered his natural improvidence. The missionaries, who
have effected so marvellous a change in his moral and religious
sentiments, who have induced him to join in the suppression of such
customs as polygamy, cannibalism, strangling of widows, amputating the
finger as a mark of mourning, dressing the hair in heathen fashion,
wearing the loin bandage, tattooing and many others, have neglected to
teach him to care for his health and his physical well-being. They have
taught him to cultivate his mind rather than his food plantation, and
they have given him no immediate punishment for thriftlessness and
disobedience to take the place of the old club law. He was accustomed to
be ruled by a strong hand because no other rule was possible, and he is
suffering from the fact that civilization was not forced upon him. If,
instead of being ceded, the country had been conquered and each man
relegated to his place with a strong hand, the dawn of settled
government would have been less bleak.
Having never known the struggle for existence that prevails in the
crowded communities of the old world, he was spurred into activity by
the fear of annihilation, for upon his alertness his existence depended.
Intertribal wars conquered the natural indolence and apathy of the
people, but, with the bestowal of the _pax Britannica_ this impulse
failed. The earth yielded all they required for their simple wants, and
they were free to indulge their natural indolence. They lack the
alertness of races who have to contend against savage animals, from
which the Fiji islands are free, and they have none of the steady
application of those who must compete with others for their daily bread.
Yet, in being thriftless and apathetic, they are but obeying a natural
law which the modern state socialist is too apt to minimize if not to
ignore. Without the necessity for a struggle between man and man or man
and Nature there has never been any progress. Society must stagnate or
slip backwards without the spur of ambition or of fear; the natural bent
of all men is to be idle. The old world Paradise was a garden that
yielded its fruit without cultivation; the old world punishment for
disobedience was the decree that man should earn his bread by the sweat
of his brow. Industry and thrift are hardly to be looked for in a
luxurious climate among a sparse population, but rather among those
races whose climate and soil yield food only at stated seasons of the
year, and then grudgingly in return for unremitting labour, or in those
crowded communities whose local supply of food is insufficient. When we
blame the Fijians for their thriftlessness we are prone to judge them by
too high a standard, and to forget that they are land-owning peasants, a
class which even among ourselves is exempt from the grinding necessity
of perpetual toil--a state that has come to be regarded as the natural
lot of the poor. The primitive organization of village communities among
whom the tie of individual property is loose and ill-defined enough to
please the most advanced socialist, causes thrift to be regarded as a
vice, and wasteful prodigality the highest virtue.
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The Fijians have already adopted some of the tools of civilization; the
native canoe has given place to vessels of European model, and so far as
clothing is necessary, European fabrics have taken the place of the old
_Liku_ and _Malo_. "Mbau," say the natives, "is adopting European
fashions"--the superficial fashions that take the fancy--"and where Mbau
leads others will follow in time." In spite of the whirlwind of war and
rapine that devastated the country fifty years ago, it would now be
difficult to find a more honest and law-abiding community than the
Fijian, so far as intercourse among themselves is concerned. It is true
that their sympathies are not yet wide enough to allow them to think of
others. Many an otherwise excellent Fijian will, with a clear
conscience, deceive and cheat a foreigner; if his pig strays, he will
pierce its eyes with thorns, or throw quicklime into them to blind the
animal and prevent it from straying again; a poor half-witted woman who
annoys her neighbours by wandering into their houses has the soles of
her feet scored with sharp knives to keep her at home. Sympathy has had
no time to develop, and consequently his sentiments are confined within
the limits of his own joint family, and do not reach up to the foreigner
or down to the lower animals.
In most respects the Fijian is some centuries behind us and it is
unreasonable to expect him to leap the gap at a single bound; yet it is
nevertheless unnecessary that he should follow the tortuous road by
which we arrived unguided at our present state of development.