TRAITS OF CHARACTER
As the natural disposition with which a child enters this world,
restrained though it may be by caution or fear of public opinion from
expressing itself in acts, remains unaltered till he leaves it, so the
character of natural man is untouched, even superficially, by the decay
of his customary law. The surface of the lake is lashed into foam by the
passing squall; but a fathom beneath the water lies untroubled.
Though the Fijian character has been described as full of
contradictions, when it is examined by the light of their moral code,
which differs vitally in some respect from ours, it will be found to be
as consistent as our own. How, it may be asked, can a people addicted to
cannibalism and to acts of ferocious cruelty be the most timid, polite
and hospitable of mankind? To any one intimately acquainted with the
people these facts are perfectly consistent, though it is a little
difficult to reconcile them in cold print. Timidity, as Williams stated
many years ago, is the key to the Fijian character. Beset by a myriad
perils from the cradle-mat to the burial-cave, he went in terror of his
life. On the one hand there were the Unseen Powers quick to avenge every
infringement of a tabu, however unwitting; on the other was his own
chief, quick to take offence, and beyond him the enemy, ever ready to
waylay the unwary in a lonely part of the road. In such an atmosphere
the cardinal virtues do not thrive, and it is not to be wondered at that
the Fijian was suspicious, and held craft and adroit lying in high
esteem. He was polite and hospitable, because, with so many enemies
already, his instinct was always to convert every new potential foe
into an ally, or at least not to give him an excuse for thinking himself
slighted. His cruelty also proceeded in part from timidity. "_Moku na
katikati_" (Slay the women and children) was, as a Christian native once
assured me, a sound maxim, for the object in war was to crush your enemy
beyond the power of retaliation, and women and children breed avengers
to harass your old age. The horrible cruelties inflicted on captives
were in part propitiations to the War-god, and in part the same
thoughtless love of mischief that moves English school-boys to tie a
kettle to a dog's tail, because its sufferings are amusing to watch, and
they do not understand.
[Pageheader: CONTRADICTIONS IN CHARACTER]
The sympathies of the Fijian reached to the limit of his tribe and no
further, but within that limit they were active enough. After torturing,
mutilating, and devouring his helpless captives, the warrior washed off
his war-paint, went home and played with his children, received his
visitors with stately politeness, and performed his part in the ornate
and elaborate ceremonial of social life. Both phases were custom, and to
his mind not in the least incongruous.
In the matter of lying he drew a nice distinction. It was a crime to lie
to his chief; it was, if not a virtue, at least a title to public
admiration to display something cruder than the craft of Odysseus to an
enemy, or to a person not a member of his tribe. The maxim "All is fair
in love and war" was applied literally. To pretend alliance, and then
treacherously to smite the ally from behind, as Namosimalua did to the
people of Naingani, was more esteemed than barren courage. I have heard
a young chief boast of having gratified his passion by compelling the
lover of the girl he coveted to overcome her scruples while he hid in
the dark behind him, so that at the last he might push him aside and
personate him. In these days the European has dropped easily into the
place formerly occupied by the extra-tribal man. By an administrative
fiction the Governor of the colony is supreme chief over the natives,
and the natives have fallen easily into the habit of paying him all the
external marks of respect which are due to their own chiefs, even,
rather incongruously, greeting him with the _tama_, or shout of respect
which is due only to the chief in whom is enshrined the ancestral
spirit of the man who utters it. There have been governors who have been
deceived into the belief that they really enjoy _ex officio_ the
prestige of a supreme chief, and that the natives will not dare to lie
to them. In 1888 an European named Stewart was murdered on the Sambeto
coast. Another European was arrested and tried for the crime, but the
issue was confused by a number of native witnesses, who came forward
with two wholly incompatible stories, both designed to fasten the guilt
upon the accused man. One of these stories hung upon a letter said to
have been written by a petty chief who in heathen times would have held
an office akin to that of hereditary executioner. The governor
interrogated this man, and, convinced from his knowledge of native
character that the man would not dare to lie solemnly to his supreme
chief, accepted the story, and placed the matter in my hands as Acting
Head of the Native Office. Everything turned upon the question whether
the man had himself written the letter, and I knew that he could not
write, but since the Governor could not be convinced without proof, I
induced him to send for the chief, and put my statement to the test. I
could not help admiring the native's courage and persistence. Even when
writing materials were put before him in the Governor's presence, and he
was ordered to copy a verse from the Fijian Bible, he did not falter.
For a full ten minutes he plodded away with an implement that he had
never had between his fingers before, trailing a drunken zigzag across
the paper like the track of a fly rescued from drowning in an inkpot. He
took his unmasking with quiet dignity, however, and the murder remains a
mystery to this day. To his own chief he would not have lied: the
Governor of the colony was simply a foreigner to whom he owed no
allegiance.
[Pageheader: DEFRAUDING WITH DIGNITY]
Europeans hold opinions regarding the honesty of Fijians according to
their individual experience. There is no equivalent for the word in the
language, though there is a word for theft. In the ancient moral code
theft and cheating were virtues or vices according to whether they were
practised upon a stranger or a member of the tribe and inasmuch as the
white man falls into the former category, and is possessed of priceless
treasures to boot, it was not to be expected that the Fijian would
regard cheating him as an offence against morality. It was an injury,
and since to injure a man who had befriended you is a mean action,
public opinion would mildly condemn the robbing of a friendly white man.
Cheating and theft really date from the arrival of Europeans, for in the
small communities of the old time it was well-nigh impossible to rob a
fellow-tribesman without being found out, and to despoil an enemy was,
as it is with us, legitimate.
In the matter of dishonesty it is, of course, the country storekeeper
who suffers most, and it is therefore he who gives the Fijian the worst
character. The native, from the highest to the lowest, will run into
debt under the most solemn promises, and would never pay unless induced
by cajolery, or compelled under the pressure of a refusal to give
further credit. Even so he will display great ingenuity. A few years ago
the Government, anxious to introduce copper coinage into a colony where
a silver threepenny piece was the lowest currency, tried the experiment
of paying a portion of the tax refund in copper. The natives showed a
great unwillingness to accept it, but the late Roko Tui Lau, an old
chief noted for his stately and dignified manners, won the gratitude of
his people by including all the copper coins in his own share. On the
following day, accompanied by his train carrying bags of money, he
presented himself at the German store, where his credit had long been
overstrained, and intimated that he had come to pay off his debts. The
heavy bags were clapped on the counter, and the unsuspecting trader,
believing the coins to be florins, pressed fresh supplies upon his
illustrious client, who loaded his men with goods and departed. The
trader's feelings (and, I suspect, his language) when he came to open
the bags and found not a florin among the lot, need not be dwelt upon.
The commoner forms of dishonesty--putting white stones among the
_yankona_, and watering the tobacco and the copra to increase the
weight--are well-nigh universal, and there have been a few instances of
childish attempts at forgery among domestic servants, but when the
Fijians are compared with Indian coolies, it must be confessed that
pilfering is rare. I have myself lived for years in native districts
without a door to my house, which has stood open night and day even in
my absences, and I can only recall one theft of a few shillings. A
Fijian servant will sometimes secrete a thing which he covets to see
whether it is missed. If inquiries are made for it he will be most
active in the search, and will eventually discover it in some unlikely
place, hoping to acquire merit by his diligence, but deceiving nobody.
On the other hand, money is a temptation which few natives can resist,
and it is to be feared that few native magistrates or scribes have not
at some time or other borrowed from the funds entrusted to them. They
might well plead the excuse that their wants and the calls of
hospitality have greatly increased, while their wretched salaries of
from L3 to L12 a year have not. It is much to say for them that bribery
is uncommon, and that though they may show partiality in the
administration of justice they are not corrupt.
Considering what must appear to the Fijian as the fabulous wealth of the
white man, unprotected save by a wooden wall and a crazy door, and so
temptingly placed at the mercy of the village as is the native store, it
is surprising that house-breaking is not more frequent. It is the belief
of many Fijians that every white man has a chest of money in his house,
and occasionally some restless spirit organizes a burglary among his
chosen associates. I have related elsewhere[103] how Kaikai robbed a
store at Navua, set it on fire, and sank the safe in the bed of the
river, but in order to show the school-boy light-hearted inconsequence
of the burglars, I may repeat here the confession of one of them:--
[Pageheader: NATIVE BUSHRANGERS]
"Sir, the root of the matter was Kaikai. He seduced us to do this
thing. We therefore are innocent. It happened thus: Kaikai came
into our house in the evening and said 'Eroni, let us have
prayers.' So we had prayers. Then Kaikai said, 'How would it be to
break open the white man's store?' And we said, 'It is well.' And
when we came near the store, Kaikai said, 'How would it be to set
the store on fire, and then perhaps the white man will come out?'
So we set the store on fire, and presently the white man did come
out. Then Kaikai said, 'Let us trample him.' And so we did, and
having put the chest of money in the river, we all went home."
"And what did you do then?" asked the Court.
"Kaikai said prayers."
A similar case occurred in Vanualevu, while the Australian papers were
of full of the exploits of the Kelly gang of bushrangers. Fired by the
halting translation of the local storekeeper, three otherwise blameless
youths, church-goers every one, resolved to take to the bush and make
the world ring with the story of their crimes. They began tentatively by
setting fire to an empty house, and waxing bolder, they waylaid an
elderly German storekeeper in broad day, and by dint of yelling their
tribal war-cry into his ears, put sufficient heart into themselves to
cut him down with a hatchet. A couple of mission teachers, attracted by
their shouts, put them to flight, and thereafter they seem to have lost
heart, for a week later their dead bodies were discovered far up the
mountain. They had perished like the Fijian widows of old. Two of them
had strangled the third by hauling on the loose ends of a noose of
bark-cloth; the first had then strangled the second by tying one end of
the noose to a tree, and pulling on the other, and had then hanged
himself, English fashion, from a bough.
Though naturally so timid, the Fijian has shown himself upon occasion to
be capable of extraordinary courage and self-devotion, generally,
however, when assailed by the forces of nature. There is no reason to
doubt the truth of the story that a Kandavu chief, whose canoe capsized
a mile from the Serua reef, when attacked by sharks, was protected by
his men, who formed a ring round him as he swam. As man after man was
dragged down, the rest closed in, until there were but three left to
reach the shore. I myself questioned two girls, the survivors of a party
of twelve, who had been picked up by a cutter off the mouth of the Rewa,
after all their companions had been devoured by sharks, and they had
been eight hours swimming in a rough sea. They described without a
shudder how a huge shark, glutted with the body of the last of their
playmates, had rubbed himself along their naked backs as they swam, and
had played about them until the moment of their rescue. Their fortitude
seemed, however, to be due to a lack of imagination.
To the European the natives must always seem wanting in natural
affection. Parents are fond of their children until sickness calls for
sustained effort or self-sacrifice, but their love will not bear the
strain of these. As with all races such affection as there is tends
downward and not upward. The mother is fonder of her child than the
child of his mother. In the old days the young man obeyed his father,
because he was one of the elders, the repositories of tribal lore, not
because he was his father; but when the father grew infirm he helped to
bury him alive without a trace of emotion beyond the mourning which
customary law enjoined. In these days of schools and Government
employment the young man regards the opinion of his elders no more. A
few years ago the senior Wesleyan missionary appealed to one of
Thakombau's sons to mend his ways, saying, "What would the chief, your
father, have said?" The young man jerked his thumb contemptuously
towards the tomb on the hill above them, and replied, "My father? Why,
he's dead." While there is a certain comradeship between brothers and
the first cousins who are classed as brothers, the customary law that
forbids brothers and sisters to speak to one another is a bar to any
affection between these. On the other hand, there is loyalty and
fidelity between husbands and wives, though it is more perhaps the
mutual regard of partners in the same firm than warm attachment. The
only instance of demonstrative family affection that I can recall
occurred in Lomaloma when a prisoner sentenced by the Provincial Court
was being sent on board a vessel bound for Levuka. His aged mother
caught hold of him, to prevent him from entering the boat, wailing and
storming at the native policeman by turns. When they had been separated
by force, and he was fairly afloat, she cast herself down on the beach,
shrieking and throwing the sand over her head in utter abandonment of
grief. Though not more noisy, this was a very different exhibition from
the ceremonial wailing at a death. At the funeral of Tui Nandrau, one of
the last of the cannibal chiefs, I came upon two or three of the widows
howling with dry eyes, like dogs baying the moon. Seeing me, one of them
nudged her neighbour to point me out, and grinned knowingly, and then
drowned her sister wives in a howl of peculiar shrillness and poignancy.
During a cricket match at Lomaloma a canoe arrived carrying news of the
death of the father of one of the bowlers. At the end of the over his
aunt came over to the pitch to tell him, and I overheard the
conversation.
[Pageheader: CEREMONIAL WAILING]
"Here is a painful thing," she said; "Wiliame is dead. Pita has just
landed and brought the news."
"O Veka!" exclaimed the boy.
"How then? Shall we wail now, or after the game is finished?"
They discussed the point for a few moments. There were, it seemed, only
three female relations on the ground, and if the others were sent for it
would make a braver show. The boy decided the point. "Send for them," he
said, "and let us finish the match first; then we can weep."
As soon as the last wicket was down I was startled by a piercing shriek
from the scoring tent: the wailing had begun. The aunt and half-a-dozen
old crones were howling "_Oo-au-e-e_" with a peculiar long-drawn wail,
ending in a sob, while real tears coursed down their wrinkled cheeks. It
was difficult to believe that the grief was only simulated.
The reasoning power of the Fijian is not easy to classify. He is
extraordinarily observant, and in respect of natural phenomena he shows
a high power of deduction. He is an acute weather-prophet; he knows the
name and the nature of every tree and almost every plant that grows in
his forest; he is a most skilful gardener. A broken twig, a fallen
berry, are enough for him to assert positively where a wild hog has its
lair; he knows by the look of the weather where the fish are to be
found. He will tell you correctly from a footprint in the sand which of
his fellow-villagers has passed that way and when, and whether he went
in haste or leisurely, for he knows the footprints of his people as he
knows their faces, and will swear to them in court. He will probe the
secret motive that lay behind every action of one of his own people, and
he is beginning to draw deductions even from the manner of Europeans.
"Mr. ----," a Fijian once said to me of a colleague of blunt manners,
"is from Scotland. I suppose that Scotland is a 'bush' village!"
When justice has to be defeated he is remarkably acute in the story he
will concoct. Assembling the false witnesses into a house by night, he
will cunningly dissect it, dictating to each witness the part he is to
tell, repeating it over and over until the man has it by heart, even
interpolating some trifling discrepancy, so as to render it more
life-like. It is only by showing in cross-examination that none of the
witnesses will budge an inch beyond his original narrative that the
fraud can be detected.
Fijian boys, educated at an European school, are probably quite equal in
capacity and intelligence to European boys of the same age, but, though
there has hitherto been no case in which their education has been
continued beyond boyhood, there is no reason to think that this equality
would not be maintained through manhood. In early boyhood they show some
talent for arithmetic, and an extraordinary power of learning by rote.
Those who had been sent to school in Sydney speak English with but
little foreign accent. For drawing, for science, and for mechanics they
do not appear to have much aptitude. As might be expected from a people
to whom oratory comes easily, they write with ease, and their letters
and articles for the native newspaper, _Na Mata_, show close reasoning,
and sometimes scathing satire. One contributor, Ilai Moto-ni-thothoka,
displayed both imagination and literary talent.
[Pageheader: PRODUCTS OF THE TRAINING SCHOOL]
In education, however, the Fijian has never had a fair chance. The
Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Missions support native teachers in every
village in the colony, and every child learns something of reading and
writing. The teachers themselves are educated at training schools, where
more attention, naturally, is paid to fitting them for their duties as
local preachers than to giving them secular education. The two
Government enterprises, the technical school and the school for native
medical students, have not been a marked success. The boys leave the
technical school with a fair knowledge of carpentry and smithing, but as
soon as they return home the fecklessness of village life crushes all
the enterprise out of them. Either a powerful chief expects them to work
for him without pay, or relations swoop down upon them, borrow their
tools, and force them back into the daily round in the village community
to which they were born. Therein lies the secret: Custom again asserts
herself. The native hereditary _matai_ (carpenter), whose labour and
remuneration were alike prescribed by Custom, plies his adze with profit
to himself: Custom never contemplated a Government-taught carpenter; she
intended the boy to take his turn at yam-planting and hut-thatching, and
she revolts. She treats the native medical practitioner in the same
fashion. During his three years' training at Suva Hospital he may have
shown great aptitude; he may know by rote the uncouth Fijian version of
his Pharmacopoeia, in which tincture is _tinkatura_, and acid is
_asiti_; he may even have acquired some skill in diagnosis. But no
sooner is he turned adrift in his district with his medicine chest than
complaints begin to come in. He has demanded from the chief four porters
to carry his chest without payment; he is behaving like a chief,
demanding food wherever he goes, and interfering with the customs of the
people; and, at last, he is doing nothing for his pay, and his chest is
rotting in an outhouse. He has his own tale to tell: the porters dropped
his box and broke the bottles; the chief stole all his _masima Episomi_
(Epsom salts), the most popular of his drugs, and what is a doctor to do
who has nothing but _belusitoni_ (blue-stone) with which to treat his
patients? It was not many months before Dr. Corney, the Chief Medical
Officer, who had trained them with so much care, was fain to confess
that the native medical practitioner was a failure.
It is perhaps the strength of the Fijian race that education makes so
slight an impression upon his habits and character. The esteem of his
own people is more to him than that of strangers, and, if he has been
brought up by Europeans in English dress, he will revert to the national
costume as soon as he is back in his native village. Ratu Epeli, the
late Roko Tui Ndreketi, insisted on wearing the _sulu_ even in Calcutta,
and cared nothing for the notice he attracted. The Tongans, on the other
hand, and the other Melanesian races love nothing better than to dress
up as white men. Most of the chiefs will dine with you with perfect
decorum, and use a knife and fork as if they had been born to them, but
in their own houses they will sit upon the ground and eat with their
fingers as their fathers did. They have adopted such of our inventions
as are better than their own--our boats, our lamps and our
dishes--merely for convenience, but they care nothing for contrivances
that entail a change of habit. The native carpenter, whose only tool is
the adze, will buy a Sheffield blade, but he will mount it on the same
handle as his fathers used in the age of stone, and will explain, with
some reason, that the movable socket, which enables him to cut a surface
at right angles to the handle, is an invention that we should do well to
adopt.
Though they have a considerable body of traditional poetry, the Fijians
cannot be said to have much literary taste. The _mekes_ are mythological
and historical, and in the latter the fiction of exaggeration is freely
mingled with fact. Without a native commentator they are difficult to
translate, being often cast in the form of a dialogue without any
indication of a change of speaker. In descriptions of the deaths of
heroes the dirge is put into the mouth of the dead hero himself. Boating
songs, lullabies, love songs and descriptions of scenery are not to be
found in the native poem. In their indifference to the beauty of nature
they are in sharp contrast to the Tongans, whose songs are full of
admiration for flowers, running water and lovely scenery.
[Pageheader: HISTORICAL POETRY]
They judge the merit of a poem by the uniformity of metre and the
regularity with which every line in a stanza ends with the same vowel or
diphthong. This is secured by a plentiful use of expletives, by
abbreviating or prolonging words, by omitting articles, and other
poetic licence, but in very few is this kind of rhyme carried out
consistently. Some bards profess to be inspired. Others make no such
pretensions, but set about their business in the prosaic manner of a
literary hack. They teach their compositions to bands of youths who
master every detail of the poem in a single evening. It is then as
permanent and unalterable as if it had been set up in type. I had a
curious instance of the remarkable verbal memory of Fijians in a long
poem taken down from the lips of an old woman in 1893. The poem had been
published by Waterhouse twenty-seven years earlier, and on comparison
only one verbal discrepancy between the two versions was found. Repeated
from mouth to mouth, a popular poem will travel far beyond the district
in which its dialect is spoken, and thus one may often hear mekes whose
meaning is not understood by the singers. English popular songs, heard
once or twice, will thus run through the group corrupted into Fijian
words that have the nearest sound to the English ones. The common
_yankona meke_ conveys no meaning whatever to the modern Fijian, but it
is not necessarily very ancient, for it may be the corruption of a poem
composed in a local dialect.
The popularity of an historical _meke_ is not often more than sixty
years; those that are older survive only in fragments. The Mission
schools have enormously increased the output of trivial and ephemeral
poetry; at every annual school feast the children perform _mekes_,
celebrating petty incidents of village life, composed by their native
teacher, and the old tragic historical poetry has fallen upon evil days
and may soon be heard no more.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 103: _The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath._]