My life as a palagi

In 1985 I spent a brief period as Visiting Professor at the University of the South Pacific on the Fijian island of Viti Levu. These are some of my recollections. 'Palangi' is a somewhat contemptuous term for a Caucasian white man.
The South Pacific is indeed a pacific place. I was there in August, in deepest mid-winter, and the weather was warm, sunny and pleasant. White, puffy clouds graced the serene blue sky and green waves whelmed in a lulling rhythm on the sandy beaches.
Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian islands, is covered in island rainforest on the 'wet' side and straw-yellow savanna on the 'dry' side, where sugar cane is grown in extensive plantations. The University of the South Pacific serves nine island nations and the campus at Laucala Bay (a converted British Army barracks) is a restful place. Parrots sharpen their beaks on the guttering and the windows are made so that they cannot be shut: there is practically no need to close them.
The population of Fiji is almost evenly divided between Melanesians and Indians. The latter were brought there from South India in the nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. They proved to be much better entrepreneurs than the Melanesians, but despite their economic success, they cannot own the land, which is held in tribal trusts by the indigenes. When I was there, USP had a student population that was more varied than this simple distinction implies. There were Polynesians and various outer islanders, as well as some Chinese and Japanese. But the most spectacular were the Indian women: the long, silky black hair, the electric blue tunics and clinging pants, the glittering anklets, the flowing scarves. There were times when a walk around campus felt like a journey through the Arabian Nights.
Viti Levu is served by buses that have the characteristic "Fijian air conditioning"--meaning no glass in their windows. This is a good thing, as the weather can be unbearably hot and humid. It also stops the windows rattling on the uneven tracks that are the only roads into the interior of the island. Bus drivers are great stars in Fiji, as they are the only men that Indian women are able to meet, such is purdah. And they live up to it by dressing like Bollywood film stars, shirts open to the waist, gold chains swinging at their necks.
And then there are the Melanesian women. On the surface they are submissive and welcoming. Beneath that beguiling exterior they are out to snare a man: any man who has a guaranteed stipend of more than 15 Fijian dollars a month will do. Their strategy is deceptively simple. Attentive, appreciative, available and affectionate, they offer themselves in the most disarming way, but once the offer had been accepted the only possible outcome is marriage. Patrick, the Englishman who was my host, was much taken by these tall beauties with their curly black hair and regal features. A year after my visit he sent me a photograph of his wedding to a tall, straight-backed Melanesian girl called Fipe. And six months later his daughter was born. I can imagine how he must have felt when he found she was pregnant and her family came to see him with long-bladed sugar-cane knives in their hands to persuade him to "do the decent thing". He ended up with two children and a messy divorce.
Unaware of this, on my first night I went to a disco. Before going in, my two companions, Melanesian stalwarts, stopped at a bush. Each of them clipped off a sprig of foliage and put it behind his ear, so I did likewise. They laughed and playfully punched me on the shoulders. Only later did I realise that the sprig of foliage was symbolic of an unattached man looking to mate an unattached woman. Fortunately, none of the ladies in the discotheque took me seriously enough to make an offer. I later found that when one met these girls socially their opening gambit was usually "are you married?" (I wasn't) and then "do you have a job?" (I did, and by their standards a stratospherically good one). Later during my stay in Fiji I was particularly taken by a young girl with a complexion the colour fo milky coffee and spectacular bosoms who was part of a dance troupe that entertained the tourists. She clearly registered my interest. But by then I was ready to go home to America and was not going to allow myself to fall into the trap. So when she asked me "Are you married?" I said "Yes!"
The highlight of the disco was a dance by a troupe of brown-skinned Melanesian men dressed in nothing but grass skirts and war paint, who wielded spears and bamboo shields. Under strobe lights and to the sound of pulsating disco music the impression they left was quite unforgettable, and their ability to do break-dancing with spears and shields in their hands was the stuff of legend.
Then we went back to Patrick's house and sat in his living room drinking small glasses of Fiji Bitter, the dark, potent beer of the islands, sitting there in a silent revery watching the geckos fight each other on the ceiling above our heads and listening to them cluck menacingly. At intervals the guttering outside would rattle as yellow-crested galars strutted along it, and all the time the leaves of the banana trees in the garden rustled in the breeze like soft, intense rainfall.
We went to Wainimala in the centre of the island. We took some gifts with us: a few tins of pilchards, bags of tea; some yaqona, the root of the kava plant. We stayed with the local school teacher, who very kindly gave up his house to us and spent the night sleeping on the floor of his kitchen, a building made of bamboo and banana leaves. I had the pleasure of sleeping on a damp, termite-proof piece of plywood, which I suppose was his bed. In the morning I got up and put on my sulu, a brightly coloured skirt. This reminds me that in Fiji it is the men who wear the skirts. The male soldiers of the Fijian Army who guard the Governor's Palace, the home of the chief Ratu, wear leather skirts. The typical Fijian businessman wears a jacket, waistcoat, old school tie and elegantly tailored pin-striped skirt, and he carries a briefcase. Ordinary people wear a piece of cotton, wound round their waists and stretching to just below their knees, which for modesty's sake must be covered.
I went into the kitchen and sat down on the floor next to the red-and-white checked tablecloth. On this, food was spread out for breakfast, mostly food left over from the night before. Fortunately there was no boiled tapioca, which I found could not be swallowed below the level of the Adam's apple. In the corner of the table cloth there was a hen which was laying an egg. To be honest, I had never seen a hen lay an egg and I did not realise it was such a painful and traumatic process. The hen clucked and crowed in a crescendo of sound that ended when the egg rolled out and the hen disappeared out the door of the kitchen in a flurry of feathers after running desperately across the tablecloth and plunging her claws into all the food on it as she went. Then we proceeded to eat the egg.
Walks in the forest were most elevating. The old, spent volcanoes of the centre of the island towered above it, slate grey in the distance. The foliage was an intense green, the leaves of some of the forest plants were as large as a sheet, a green sheet with deep, translucent veins in it. Dragon flies buzzed around them with their wings shimmering brilliantly. I picked up a seed that was the size of a medal, it gleamed a rich mahogany brown. Although the Melanesian Fijians are nominally Christians of various denominations, in the fields of yaqona plants I found a pagan idol carved out of that curiously dense and fibrous mass of roots that can be found on tropical islands. Its eyes were blindfolded.
At night the villages echo to the rhythmic thump of yaqona being pounded to dust so that it can be infused with river water to make 'grog', the drink of the ethnic Fijians. Yaqona (pronounced "yangona") is mildly soporific and has very little taste (most of that comes from the mud in the river water). It is drunk in half a coconut shell with much ritual clapping and cries of "Mahther!" ("down in one"). Yaqona is the root of life, and in fact it looks like a human figurine, rather as does the Ginseng root or the mandrake. Fijians are addicted to ceremony and as such a hundred years ago they found an unexpected affinity with their British colonists (the Fijian Islands annexed themselves to the British Empire in 1870).
Many protocols and conventions must be observed when entering a village: backpack lowered in the name of humility, knees covered in the name of modesty; never sit higher than you host. And take your gifts straight for the house of the village chief. Even if this is only one room, it will be divided into four parts: public, semi-public, semi-private and private. One enters, of course, into the public part. There will be furniture, but Fijians will not use it, for they are much more comfortable squatting on the floor, and that is what their visitors must do, however agonising it feels. Yaqona is infused in a carved dish of tropical hardwood called a tanoa. Coconut shells are filled and passed around, cupped hands are clapped, "Mahther!" is said (with feeling) and speeches are made. This is sevu-sevu, the Fijian welcoming ceremony. At one sevu-sevu I ended up drinking twelve helpings of yaqona and I must admit it had no effect on me whatsoever.
During a lull in one of these ceremonies, a tribal elder turned to us and said, reflectively, "You know, a hundred years ago.... we'd have eaten you!"--a comforting thought. Officially, the last person to be eaten on Viti Levu was the English Methodist minister the Rev. James Baker. He was an insufferable zealot and to some extent must have deserved his fate. His body was dismembered and pressure cooked in a hole in the ground. A thigh garnished with steamed spinach was presented to Matanitu, the chief of the islands. But Matanitu had by then obtained a B.A. from Oxford University and affected to be disgusted by the offer. "Take it away, old boy!" he said in his affected Oxford accept. On the way to the dump the thigh disappeared. This was somewhat strange, as the meat of the white man was considered inferior to that of the Melanesians: no one wanted to absorb the spirit of such a person. However, it was the end of an era, so perhaps this macabre gastronomic theft reflected nostalgia for an earlier way of life. But not quite the end, apparently, as I heard rumours that someone had been eaten, deep in the mountains, in 1957.
One day we went down to Nausori airport to catch a plane to Levuka. Patrick spent most of the waiting period trying to chat up the loquacious Fijian girl who sold newspapers in the terminal, but before he could get around to asking her for a date along came a farm tractor towing our aircraft. At $9.50 Fijian for a one-way ticket it was not an expensive flight, nor was it a very long one. We got into the plane and, as I was sitting with my knees pressed into the small of the pilot's back, I said to him "Do you realise you have a flat tyre?" He replied in a broad New Zealand accent "Nah nah mate, these tyres are low profile. If they were fully blown up we'd dig a trench in the runway."
The take-off went well enough and we soon reached our cruising altitude of 90 metres above sea level. This afforded a good view of the mangrove coasts of Motoriki Island and shortly after that we landed at a clearing in the rainforest of Overlau, the chief island of the Lau Group. The landing was bumpy, and I assumed this was because the runway was effectively a ploughed field, but when I climbed down from the aircraft it was immediately apparent that the right tyre was blown up and the left one was not. Before I could say anything the pilot had turned the plane around and taken off, with a rolling diagonal gait, for the next island on his itinerary.
Our first port of call was the Chief of Police's house. He proved to be quite welcoming and his house was remarkably western in style, with modern furniture and fittings. His wife invited us into the kitchen for a cup of tea, but as Melanesians do not like sitting on chairs we sat down under the kitchen table and looked up at the lady as she brewed the tea above our heads.
The guest house on Overlau was pure colonial in style. Most of the guests were mosquitoes, with whom we had quite a battle as they tended to get trapped in the acres of netting that we rolled into in a vain attempt to get to sleep. In recompense there were fresh papayas for breakfast, and they were as tangy as mangoes.
But Overlau was the first place in the South Pacific that I saw really poor people. Families of Indians lived in houses made out of flattened-out oil cans. The local restaurant had no furniture, no cutlery and only the smallest number of bowls: chapatis and chicken curry, balanced on one's knees, eaten with the hands, crouched in the corner of a large, empty cement room. We walked up a dirt track into the centre of the island, the ancient crater of an extinct volcano. The track wound its way through clamps of nicotine-yellow coconuts that gleamed in their giant husks. The road surface was pitted with the flattened bodies of frogs that had been run over and tanned by the midday heat. The island rain forest with which the crater walls were garlanded was a gorgeous deep green and the huge leaves of the plants dripped with sweet sap and crystal clear rainwater.
Back on Viti Levu I was introduced to Emosi, the Chief of one of the outer islands. I had hired a tiny car in the hope of driving right around the island. Emosi said he would come with me. He had no experience of travelling by car, as his island had no roads on it, only four fishing villages connected by boat journeys. We set off in grand style, whooshing past the colonial villas surrounded by palm trees and pineapple plantations. But after several hours of wrestling with the steering wheel, I had to give up. The road was too rutted to be travelled along in a Suzuki 800. On the way back we stopped at a local restaurant, a typical bamboo and banana leaf eatery, and Emosi ordered a plate of eka vaka lolo (fish with coconut sauce). It was made in the traditional way by boiling the fish, shaking the coconut down from the tree, splitting it open with an awl, throwing the juice away and grating the flesh onto the fish. The cook then added a garnishing of potatoes and large lumps of tapioca, the world's most indigestible vegetable. Emosi sunk his teeth into this shining example of Melanesian cuisine and said "Ah! That's real food!" He looked disparagingly at my chicken curry and added "I can't stand that fancy stuff you're eating."
Shortly before I was due to leave Fiji the Methodist community decided to celebrate its centenary on the cricket pitch outside the Ratu's palace. In the Pacific Grand Hotel the ceiling fans stirred up the moths and mosquitoes and the rattan chairs creaked much as they had in the colonial era. Crowds dressed in mud-daubed bark-skin licked at 'Tip-Top' ice-creams (whatever Tip-Top made its ice creams with, there was certainly no milk or cream in them). And outer islanders came by in troupes and phalanxes, designer glasses and grass skirts--real grass skirts, not the fluorescent plastic ones that were being sold down by the port for $2.95 Fijian.
My last night in Fiji was idyllic. I sat cross-legged in a bamboo and banana leaf hut drinking coconut-half after coconut-half of yaqona, clapping with cupped hands and listening to the members of the Viti Levu Rugby Club strum their ukuleles and sing in that sonorous harmony that is so hauntingly characteristic of the South Pacific (their team had just lost a match against Vatulele, the second island). The moon hung large in the tropical sky, the waves burst rhythmically on the shore nearby, fireflies shimmered in the night air, and next to me a tall, straight-backed Fijian maiden with frizzy black hair smiled at me in that disarming way that they have and looked beautiful in the moonlight.
Palangis are not often welcomed into island society in Fiji. In fact, the tourists, most of whom are brash Australasians, are rigidly segregated from the real Fiji. I was privileged to be allowed into the villages of the Wainimala and Levuka districts. I was perhaps not a perfect guest, but I tried to act with humility and show sensitivity to local traditions and a sincere appreciation for the hospitality that was given to me.
A year later there was a minor civil war on Viti Levu. The Govinda Hari Krishna restaurant in Suva appeared on television screens around the world with smoke and flames pouring out of it. That was such a pity as it was the cleanest and best restaurant in the country and the food was cheap and very good. It was more of a pity for the ethnic hatred and unrest that it symbolised. By demographic force of numbers the Indians had won the general election. The Melanesian Fijians induced the Army to stage a coup d'etat in order to ensure that the Indians did not dismantle the tribal trusts that held the land. It ushered in an uneasy period of partial and awkward political accommodation that unfortunately is still going on.