TRADE
The necessity for bartering commodities, which is one of the earliest
needs of primitive society, was met by the Fijians in an original
manner. Nomad tribes, who are perpetually at war with their neighbours,
and are not self-supporting, satisfy their wants by raiding and plunder;
settled agricultural tribes in the same condition invent some artificial
condition under which combatants may exchange their goods to their
mutual advantage. Thus, in south-eastern New Guinea there are settled
markets on the tribal frontier fitted with counters of saplings on which
the women of either side may lay their goods and barter them without
fear of molestation by the warriors, for the ground is strictly tabu,
and neither side would dare to commit the sacrilege of striking a blow
within its precincts.
In Fiji the natural productions of the country led to localizing of
industries. No tribe, however wide its territory, was entirely
self-supporting. Salt came only from the salt-pans in the mangrove
swamps; cooking-pots from the clay-pits on outlying islands; the
painting of _gnatu_ was an art peculiar to a few; the carving of bowls
and the building of canoes were the craft of the carpenter clans and no
other. The comfort, if not the existence, of a tribe depended upon
barter, and the form of barter devised by the Fijians accorded exactly
with their passion for formal ceremonial.
The Solevu (_So-levu_, _i.e._ Great Presentation)
[Pageheader: CEREMONIAL FORM OF BARTER]
The _solevu_ is the formal presentation of property by one clan or sept
to another. The ceremonial was much the same whenever merchandise had
to pass, whether as tribute, reward, or free exchange between equals.
There were formerly many reasons for _solevu_. Help given by allies in
war time entitled them to a _solevu_ from the succoured; quarter given
by a conquering army in the moment of victory placed the vanquished
under a like obligation; the death of a high chief gave his relatives a
claim upon the subject tribes; a marriage entitled the relations of the
bride to a _solevu_ from the bridegroom's people. _Solevu_ celebrated
under these circumstances, being in the nature of payment for services
rendered, did not call for any return, though they brought about the
circulation of property. But between tribes of equal rank that had no
such excuse for demanding presentations from each other there was a form
of _solevu_ that was trading pure and simple. A tribe that owned
salt-pans such as those at Nandi Bay wanted mats. It would send a formal
messenger to one of the islands of Yasawa, asking permission to bring
them a _solevu_ of salt. Yasawa accepted. The _solevu_ took place, both
donors and recipients preserving a very accurate remembrance of the
value of the present. After some months, or even years, Yasawa, having
plaited a store of mats equivalent to their estimate of the value of the
salt, would propose to return the _solevu_, and the score would be wiped
off. If they seemed to hang fire, deft hints would be conveyed to them
by the gossip-mongers, that they were fast becoming a by-word on the
Nandi coast. If their offering fell short of the value due from them the
formal gratitude of their entertainers would lose nothing of its
correctness at the time. The speeches would be as complimentary as
usual, the hand-clapping as hearty, but none the less would they be made
to hang their heads with shame when they had returned to their own
island, and heard from the gossip-mongers some of the caustic epigrams
current in Nandi at their expense.
Technically, the merchandise of a _solevu_ was presented to the chief,
but the greater part of it reached the people whose labour had provided
its purchase-equivalent. A good chief divided it out upon the spot among
the septs composing the clan, who in turn assigned it to the individual
heads of houses; a selfish chief stored it away, and doled it out to
such of his dependants or subject chiefs as chose to ask for it by
_kere-kere_, but he applied it to his own use at the cost of his
popularity, and, therefore, of his power. So long as a chief felt that
his position depended on the suffrages of his subjects he did not dare
to indulge his greed, and the trade balance was preserved. He might,
however, apply it to the common advantage of the tribe, to pay off
allies, or to purchase a new alliance, in which case the consent of his
advisers carried with it the consent of the whole tribe. A European,
staying with a great chief such as the Vunivalu of Mbau, is astonished
at the number of minor presentations. Several times, perhaps, during the
course of the day the _tama_ is shouted from without the house. The
chief's _mata_ looks out, and announces the arrival of some subject clan
with an offering--a roll of sinnet, a bale of cloth, a turtle, and the
inevitable root of kava. A few of the household step out to listen to
the speech of presentation and clap their hands in the prescribed form,
but the chief himself scarcely deigns to check his conversation to
listen. The merchandise is carried to a storehouse, where in due course
it will be doled out to some chief desiring it, for the use of his
numerous dependants, or used in the tangled political negotiations on
which the safety of the federation depends. These minor presentations
are in reality public revenue, and their equivalent in England would be
found if every landowner brought his income-or land-tax in kind to
Windsor and laid it with due ceremony at the gate of the castle.
[Pageheader: THE RITUAL]
The ceremonial varied slightly according to the local custom and the
cause for which the _solevu_ was presented. The details of a
marriage-gift differed from those of the obsequies of a dead chief; the
ordinary trade _solevu_ between equals followed a simpler ritual than
that of an offering of a vanquished tribe to its victors. But the
general form was the same. Upon the appointed day the donors carried
their wares to the village of the recipients, and halted upon the
outskirts while their herald approached the chief's house and _tama_-ed,
asking permission for his people to enter. The notables of the village
being assembled in the square, the donors approached in procession, and
were dismissed to the empty houses prepared for them, or, if the party
was a large one, to the temporary shelters erected for their
accommodation. To these they carried their merchandise, and they were
scarcely settled when their entertainers filed in procession to the
door, bearing the feast (_mangiti_) of cooked and raw yams, fish, hogs
half-roasted and the ceremonial root of _yankona_. This having been
presented and accepted according to the usual formula, the visitors were
left to their own devices. In the evening individuals might visit their
acquaintances in the village; the young men or women of the village,
perhaps, entertained their guests with a night dance by the light of
bonfires, but there was no general intercourse between the entertainers
and the entertained. On the morrow, after the morning meal, the visitors
removed their merchandise to the cover of the forest or the outskirts,
and made ready their ceremonial entrance. There, the leaders wound many
fathoms of native cloth about their bodies. The leading chief wore so
cumbersome a cincture of it that his arms stuck out horizontally, and a
man had to walk beside him on either side supporting its weight. The
grown men blackened their faces and festooned the cloth about them until
their bodies were entirely hidden, and they resembled turkey cocks with
tails outspread. Armed with spears and clubs, bearing enormous turbans
on their heads, they were ready for the great ballet that was to follow.
The rest shouldered the salt or mats or pots, and the procession was
formed. A warrior with blackened face led the way. With his spear poised
he crept forward step by step as if about to launch it at his hosts,
pausing every few yards with a sharp jerk of the elbow that set the
point quivering. The chief and his elders followed, bending under the
weight of their huge girdles. Then came others with a litter of boughs
supporting a great bale of white bark-cloth, and many more followed with
the rest of the merchandise, their hosts greeting them with shouts of
"_Vinaka! Vinaka!_" (Well done! Well done!). In the centre of the square
they halted, and laid down their burdens on a fast-increasing pile,
each retiring when his task was done. The chiefs unwound their girdles,
a process that occupied many minutes, and stepped out at last, naked to
their waist-cloths, leaving the cloth as a stiff rampart about the spot
where they had halted. Meanwhile some twenty of the bearers had seated
themselves apart. They set up a chant, marking the time with a small
wooden drum, and the boom of hollow bamboos struck endwise upon the
earth. Then from behind the houses came the ballet, five or six deep,
with a few paces' interval between each. With their black faces, their
enormous turbans, their strange dress and their arms they were a
terrifying spectacle. No ballet is so well drilled as this. Every
gesture of the hands, the heads and the eyes is timed with a precision
that months of practice would not achieve were there not an inborn
dexterity to build upon. Little boys of four or five may be seen on the
outskirts of the practice-ground swaying their limbs and bodies in
elaborate contortions which Europeans after a prolonged gymnastic
training would execute very clumsily. The words chanted by the band may
either be traditional poems whose meaning is obscure, or the composition
of the leader of the dance, for nearly every district has its poet, who
retires to the forest for free access of the muse, and surpasses the
mediaeval troubadours in that he sets his words, not only to music, but
to action, and is poet, composer and ballet-master in one.
[Pageheader: A GREAT WAR DANCE]
A description of one of these dances given by the mountaineers of Bemana
at the Great Council of Chiefs held in Nandronga in 1887 will serve for
all. The dancers marched into the great square in twenty ranks of ten,
and squatted down with spears poised. In their crouching posture the
festoons of their draperies took on the symmetry of haycocks, each
surmounted with a heavy knob for ornament, for their enormous turbans
almost hid the blackened faces. Their sloping spears swayed like a
thicket of bamboos swept by a breeze. And now the chant quickened to a
sinister rhythm, and there was a menace in the stillness of the dancers.
One huge fellow, detached from the rest, began to mark the exciting
drum-beat by fluttering the enormous war-fan he carried in his left
hand; the rest seemed motionless unless you looked into the shadow of
the turbans, where their restless eyes gleamed unnaturally white from
the soot that besmeared their faces. As the chant grew in shrillness and
the drums beat a devil's tattoo that set the muscles of the vast
concourse of spectators twitching with excitement, the dancers became
unnaturally still, not a spear wavered in its slope.
The spell was broken by a shout, deep-toned and mighty, from a hundred
warriors' throats. A third of the band leaps up, and, with spears poised
aloft, marches straight and compact to the further end, turns about and
retreats to its place. But ere the foremost are within touch of their
companions another third springs up and joins them, and together they
repeat the manoeuvre. Another shout and the whole body is in motion.
The earth trembles with its tramp; the rattle of its stiff trappings
drowns the whine of the singers. This time they do not return. The first
rank is within a pace of the line of spectators when the leader--he of
the war-fan--gives the signal. They are down now, with bodies bent low,
and spears poised for stabbing or hurling. Their legs are like bent
springs, so lightly they leap as they take open order. The leader flirts
his huge fan, and runs swiftly up and down, shouting orders that need
never have been shouted. For every movement, of body, head, arm or foot,
is executed as if one wire moved the whole two hundred. They pursue,
they flee, they stab a fallen enemy, they dodge his blows by a sideways
jerk of the head, they run at topmost speed, and the earth shakes at the
tramp of their running, though they do not advance an inch, and their
running feet strike always in the same spot. Their eyes blaze and their
teeth grin with fury, the sooty sweat courses down their skin, the loops
of stiff drapery clash about them. In other dances some luckless dancer
commits a fault not to be detected by European eyes, and excites the
loud derision of the spectators, but here all the dancers are perfect in
their parts and the crowd is awed by the verisimilitude of the piece. At
the outset a few ribald spirits of the coast tribes applauded the
terrific appearance and gestures of the warriors in obvious irony, but
presently, when the play seemed to settle to sober earnest, a fearful
silence fell upon them all. The evolutions of the dancers gave occasion.
Retiring step by step before an imaginary foe to the further end of the
square, they would dash forward in compact phalanx upon the bank of
spectators, checking their onset with a suddenness that seemed to defy
the laws of momentum. If this was but the image of war, surely the
reality must be less terrible. To sit still unarmed while two hundred
untamed devils charge over one with their stabbing-spears is not
courage, but foolhardiness--so, at least, thought the men of Mbua who
faced the dance. And so, when the grass was strewn with the fragments of
the trappings, and the dancers were struck to stone in the midst of
their most furious onslaught, the solid bank of spectators broke and
fled. Only when the warriors had walked tamely off to add their finery
to the heap of presents did they begin to slink back one by one, looking
the more foolish for their heroic efforts to join in the laugh against
themselves.
The Solevu in Decay
[Illustration: A War Dance.]
[Pageheader: ABUSE OF THE _SOLEVU_]
With the arrival of the trader who, all unconsciously, was set to teach
the natives an entirely new system of trade based on currency, all need
for the _solevu_ vanished, and each native product immediately acquired
a recognized place in the scale of values, either in money or calico.
Nothing shows the extraordinary conservatism of the Fijians better than
the fact that they did not at once abandon the _solevu_ in favour of an
informal sale of native products to one another. The two systems
continued to flourish side by side, the native carried his produce to
the trader and took cash or groceries in exchange on the spot, but he
continued to manufacture large quantities of goods intended for
ceremonial presentations to his neighbours and to trust to receiving the
equivalent at some time in the uncertain future. For a time the _solevu_
was encouraged by the Government upon the ground that it would form a
substitute for commerce until the natives should become accustomed to
money as a medium of exchange, and that it was inseparable from the
native social system, which for political reasons it was convenient
to retain. It was felt that without the _solevu_ the manufacture of
mats, pottery, salt, bark-cloth, sinnet, wooden bowls, etc., would fall
into disuse, and that the material comfort of the people would be
affected for the worse. Therefore it became usual for the _solevu_ to
take place at every half-yearly Provincial Council at which each
district became in rotation the entertainers of the others. Upon the
entertainers fell the burden of building new houses, a very salutary
provision, of providing food for a vast concourse of people for several
days, and of manufacturing an immense quantity of mats of native cloth
to be presented to the visitors. In return the entertainers would
theoretically be entitled to a share of the property presented by the
guests on their arrival, and of that given at other councils when the
part of playing host fell to others. This would have been well enough if
the presentation had been kept within bounds, and the spoil had been
properly divided, but the emulation of the chiefs to outdo one another
in hospitality led them to bring pressure to bear upon their people, and
the chief burden fell upon the women, whose principal duty was to
produce the things required for the _solevu_. Moreover, less of the
property reached the producers than formerly, the lion's share being
appropriated by the chiefs who attended the council. Being a distortion
of the real native custom, the _solevu_ began to lose much of its native
character.
At Ndeumba, where the natives earn considerable incomes from growing
bananas, the property given consisted exclusively of European
commodities, such as kerosene, tins of biscuits and calico, purchased in
Suva, while at Rewa a cutter, filled to the hatches with tins of
kerosene, formed the contribution of the Tonga district. The _solevu_
had thus grown to be an intolerable burden. They were far larger and
more frequent than in the old days, they were given and received by the
wrong people. As long as a single tribe or joint family was concerned,
every householder or head of family got his fair share according to his
rank. It was not custom that the group of tribes that form the modern
district should receive a presentation in common, and, as usual, the
native mind could devise no new law to meet the new emergency.
Accordingly, in June, 1892, the Government formally forbade the
interchange of property at Provincial Councils. By the people at large
the order was welcomed, and as a means of commerce the _solevu_ may now
be said to have ceased to exist.
But one evil resulting from the mutilated custom still survives. In the
old days a single district or village was rarely called upon to feed
large assemblages of people; now, every Provincial Council is made the
excuse for immense profusion and waste. At some of them as many as one
hundred and sixty pigs and turtle and six thousand yams and taro are
consumed in two days, and at the Annual Meeting of the Chiefs the food
provided by the entertainers reaches more than ten times that amount. It
is not all eaten, of course. Several tons of cooked food are thrown to
rot on the seashore, but the Government is probably right in not
interfering to check this prodigality. The necessity of planting large
reserves of food secures the people against an unexpected famine, caused
by flood, hurricane or droughts; if they lost the fear of being
reproached for being niggardly it is more than probable that they would
cease to plant sufficient food for their bare needs.
When the _solevu_ of the Provincial Councils was abolished the Governor
laid before the chiefs the proposal to establish a system of intertribal
barter in the local markets, which is a Melanesian and Papuan custom;
this ought not to have been repugnant to Fijian ideas, but the chiefs
could not be induced to take any interest in the proposal, which shows
that their attachment to the primitive _solevu_ was no longer due to the
necessity for barter, but rather to the elaborate ceremonial display
which is so dear to the native mind.
[Pageheader: MARKETING AND _SOLEVU_]
Yet the Fijians are by no means deficient in the mercantile instinct. In
some districts side by side with the _solevu_ a regular system of trade
by barter was practised. At Lekutu in Mbau the townspeople were in the
habit of bartering fish and salt with the hill people for vegetable
produce. There were regular market-places, and the barter took place at
fixed intervals. At Kandavu a single household or tribal sept having a
store of bark-cloth, or some other commodity, would invite the
possessors of some coveted article to trade with them, and on the
appointed day would visit their village and hand over their property in
exchange for cooked food as well as the wares they needed. Similar
practices prevailed in Western Vitilevu between the natives of the coast
and the mountaineers; these customs were called _tango_ or _veisa_.
The growing use of money has been developed side by side with a system
of traffic in native produce, not only with European buyers, but among
the natives _inter se_. Natives of the coast districts of Tailevu, who
are required periodically to take contributions of food to Mbau on the
occasion of some ceremonial without expecting any remuneration, at the
same time carry on a regular trade with their chiefs at Mbau, hawking
vegetables or fowls from house to house for money or its equivalent in
European articles. Thus they draw a clear line of distinction between
_lala_ and barter.