THE INSOUCIANCE OF NATIVE RACES
If we were called upon to name the one invention that stands between
savagery and the growth of civilization we might fairly choose the
timepiece of sundial. Fixed routine in daily life is unknown to
primitive man, whose functions are controlled only by the impulse of the
moment. Even among civilized races the most stagnant are those who have
never learnt to put a value upon time, and who, like the Spanish, give
an honourable place in their vocabulary to the word _manana_, or its
equivalent. Few, if any, of the natural races have made any provision in
their vocabulary for any division of time less than the day; they have
no word for hour, minute, or second, nor would they have any for day, if
Nature had not divided the one from the other by intervals of darkness.
Only three divisions of time were known to the Fijians: the year
(_yambaki_), so named from the heathen harvest home (_mbaki_); the lunar
month (_vula_); and the day (_singa_). He identifies any greater
divisions of time by naming the reigning chief of the period, or by
saying, "When so-and-so was so high," indicating some aged man in the
party and marking his height at the time of the occurrence in the air
with the hand. He will indicate the time of an event in the immediate
past or future by the yam crop--"When the yams are ripe," or "At last
planting time"; about the remote future he never troubles himself.
[Pageheader: FIJIANS ABHOR PUNCTUALITY]
The Fijian eats when he is hungry, or when the sight of cooked food
whets his appetite; he bathes only when he would cool his body; he
sleeps when he is disinclined to work or when darkness has made work
impossible; regular hours for all these functions are quite unknown to
him. His nearest approach to regularity is his observance of the season
for yam planting, but this is because tradition has taught him that if
he fails to plant his yams when the _drala_-tree is in flower, he will
lack food in the following year. On one day he will work in his yam
patch from sunrise till evening, and bathe at five o'clock and sleep the
whole night through after a heavy meal. On another he will return from
work at noon, and slumber away the hot afternoon, spending the night in
feasting and dancing. He is improperly fed, not because food is scarce,
but because he is incapable of the routine of regular meals or of any
moderation. In times of plenty his diet is not improved, because he
wastes his surplus in prodigal feasting. In times of scarcity he suffers
because he will not husband his resources. System of any kind is
peculiarly irksome to him. The Rev. W. Slade, a Wesleyan missionary,
gives a good instance of this characteristic in the case of the mother
of a seven-months child born in the neighbourhood of his mission station
in 1893. "The woman herself cannot supply sufficient nourishment to the
child, and has been told to come to the house twice a day for fresh
cow's milk. She came for a few days and then ceased. Upon inquiry I
found that, although the child was dying of starvation, she found it
irksome to apply for the milk. Her maternal affection failed under the
strain of walking one hundred yards twice a day." In the few instances
in which a Fijian has attempted to keep cattle he has shown that he
would rather let his beasts die of thirst than be bound by the necessity
of giving them water at stated intervals. He cannot use dairy produce
because he would fail to milk his cows regularly and to wash the
utensils in which the milk was kept. The law of custom knew these
defects in his character and provided for them. In the days of
intertribal warfare if a village was to exist at all it must have food
stored against a siege. There was a season for planting yams, and the
soil would yield nothing to the slovenly planter. Public opinion took
care that no man in the community shirked his work. The pigs and poultry
thrived because they required neither feeding nor tending at regular
hours. The canoe was kept under shelter, and the matsail stripped from
the yard on the first threat of a downpour of rain, because their owner
knew that he would have to pay the carpenter for repairing them in food
planted by his own hand. But the law of custom has made no provision for
innovations. The sailing-boat, the one possession in which the Fijian
takes the greatest pride, is allowed to decay almost past repair before
he will think of refitting it, although he is well aware that a regular
supply of paint and rope would have made much of the expense
unnecessary. He is still passably energetic about his ancient pursuits
of planting and fishing, but this fishing, which might be turned to
profitable account in the supply of the daily market, is a mere
desultory sport pursued because it provides an ever-varying succession
of excitement. The desultory habit of mind which defers to the morrow
all that does not appeal to the impulse of the moment affects all his
surroundings, makes his house squalid, his diet irregular, and his
village insanitary.
His insouciance, which was kept in check by the law of custom, had its
root, like most other evils, in selfishness--a quality which is quite as
much at home in a communal as it is in a civilized state of society,
where defrauding the commonwealth is looked upon as a venial offence
provided that it is not found out. In a communal state of society the
instinct of the individual is to do and to give as little as possible.
When the law of custom is breaking down, as among the Fijians, discovery
entails but little disgrace. In being selfish the Fijian is only being
what white men are. He has no patriotism and no nationality; he does not
regard Fiji as his country, for Fiji is the whole world as he knows it.
The pride that he once took in his own little tribal cosmos is dying out
now that he no longer has to fight for it, and he concerns himself less
about the natives of the twelve provinces besides his own than an
ordinary Englishman troubles about the Andaman Islanders. So that the
enjoyment of his lands in his own lifetime is not interfered with, the
Fijian does not feel called upon to avert the total extinction of his
race by any measures that demand from him the slightest exertion.
[Pageheader: WEAKNESS OF THE MATERNAL INSTINCT]
The want of the maternal instinct in the Fijian women is no new quality,
but the law of custom took it into account and provided against it. The
tribes that reared most male children had the most fighting men, and
they alone could hold their own. A tribe of habitually neglectful
parents was wiped out mercilessly, and within the limit of the tribe the
old men and women who had grown-up sons were the last to suffer from
want or insult. These incentives to the care of children may not have
been constantly before the minds of Fijian parents in the old days, but
they moulded the daily life of the community, and gave each member of it
an interest in the welfare of his fellows. Under the _Pax Britannica_ a
tribe has no longer any interest in being numerous except the fear of
losing possession of its communal land, and this fear is tempered by the
knowledge that if the land is leased to planters the rent money will go
further among few than among many. Parents no longer look to their
children to support them in old age. The law protects them from
aggression, and they have none of the fear, which besets members of
civilized communities, of destitution in their declining years.
Instances of the absence of the maternal instinct in Fijian mothers
might be multiplied. They love their children in their own casual way;
so long as they are not called upon to make the slightest self-sacrifice
for them they are foolishly indulgent to them. One cannot spend a single
night in a native village without realizing how immeasurably inferior
the Fijians are in this respect to Indian coolies or even to the Line
Islanders. When questioned on this subject an old Line Island midwife
remarked, "We Tokelau love our children; the father loves them quite as
much as the mother." Therein lies the greater part of the difference;
the Fijian mother would look in vain to her husband for any sympathy or
assistance in the upbringing of her children. In the old days when the
safety of the tribe demanded as many boys and as few girls as possible,
female children were often destroyed, but it does not appear that any
protest or resistance was ever made by the mother. The case I am about
to relate is not to be taken as a fair example of Fijian women, because
instances quite as revolting have been recorded among women of civilized
communities. Some years ago, a woman in the Rewa province, noticing that
the dark corners of her house were much infested by mosquitoes, kept her
two-year-old child naked, and forced it to stand in the corner until its
body was covered with the insects, which she then killed by slapping it.
She set this awful mosquito trap so often that the poor child died of
its injuries. It is fair to say that natives speak of this revolting
story with disgust, for the sins of Fijian mothers are sins of omission
rather than of commission. A learned work has lately been written to
prove that the key to evolution is the development of maternal instinct,
which varies enormously in strength, not only in different species of
mammalia, but in individuals. Struggle for existence tends to develop
the instinct, since those who possess it will perpetuate their offspring
to the exclusion of those who do not.
The Fijians are in a transition stage between two systems of struggle
for existence--the physical struggle of intertribal war, and the moral
struggle of modern competition. It is vain to hope that the maternal
instinct can be artificially implanted in them, but if they are ever
moved to take up the "black man's burden," and set themselves to compete
against the motley population that is pouring into their islands,
natural affection, which is now kept down by the savage's dislike of all
restraint and routine, may be born in them.