Getting Stoned with Savages (25 page)

It was a chiefly dispute, people said in Suva. In Fiji, a chief, or ratu, as we had learned, had considerable power. The vast majority of land in Fiji is Fijian owned, and rents, whether from an international resort or an Indian sugarcane farmer, are collected each month by the Native Lands Trust Commission and sent on to the local chiefs. These are inherited positions, and if there is a more lamentable form of governance than inherited power, I cannot imagine it. In Europe, of course, tax money is still dished out to a few royals. But today, this is really the equivalent of fattening up a duck for the hunt. In return for accepting the largesse of the people, the royals are subjected to hunters—known as paparazzi—who stalk them with zoom lenses, seeking out scintillating photos for the public. A good shot will result in abject humiliation and personal ruination for the royal, which strikes me as a fair bargain. Alas, Fijians still maintain a quaint reverence for all things chiefly, and when a paramount chief has dastardly deeds on his mind, there is little to stop him. It was the nefarious northern chiefs, people alleged, who were responsible for the coup and the subsequent army mutiny.

In Savusavu, however, I couldn’t quite understand why anyone would bother to trouble himself with something as nettlesome as overthrowing a government. With the morning sun, Savusavu revealed itself to be located in one of the most extraordinarily beautiful settings I had ever encountered in the islands. The town overlooked Savusavu Bay, an alluring expanse of blue water hemmed in by verdant peaks. Directly across was a small islet, and in the safety between it and the main island, a number of yachts were riding out the hurricane season.

I ambled down toward the dozen or so clapboard buildings that constituted downtown Savusavu, and four minutes later, after I had wandered from one end of the muddy town to the other, I caught a taxi in front of the covered market. For such an extraordinary locale, Savusavu was a modest town.

“Where will you be going today, sir?”

Sir?
I wasn’t often called sir in Fiji. But then I noticed that I still had my FIRST CLASS stamp on my arm. I considered getting a tattoo to make it permanent.

I didn’t really have a destination in mind, just a vague desire to see a bit of the island and perhaps have a swim somewhere. I told the driver as much.

“No problem, sir. I will show you the area around Savusavu, and then I will take you to the beach. You go for a swim, and I will come back for you after one hour. What do you think?”

This struck me as an excellent plan. The taxi driver’s name was Saresh. He was an Indo-Fijian of a venerable age.

“I have one son who is a dentist in Canada,” he said as we followed a paved road into the hills behind Savusavu. “Another son who is a welder in Christchurch, and a daughter who takes care of her children in Melbourne. She is married to an accountant. Then I have three more left here. A son who is an accountant in Suva, another who owns a garage here, and a daughter who is still a student. You see? Everybody working. Not like Fijian people.”

It often struck me how Indians and Fijians viewed each other. Indians saw Fijians as a slothful and indulgent people who never thought of the future. Fijians saw Indians as busy worker bees who needed constant watching, lest they sneak off with Fijian land. In Suva, a multiracial city, such notions were softened through interaction. Elsewhere in Fiji, however, where Fijians and Indians did not live side by side, the prejudice festered.

“Look,” Saresh said, waving at the thick bush that lined the road. “This is Fijian land. They don’t do anything with it. No farms. Nothing. They lazy, you see. Now this,” he said, gesturing toward a sculpted garden and a sumptuous house with views over Savusavu Bay, “is European land. Very tidy, you see.”

There were a surprising number of Westerners in Savusavu, I learned, chasing paradise. They had built their bungalows on the ridges above the bay. Some of the homes were on freehold land, that small portion of island land that could be bought and sold. Other homes were on what was called native land, which could only be leased from the Fijian landowners.

“And see,” Saresh continued, “this is an Indian village. It is freehold land. You see? It is very clean. Everyone takes care of their house. Not like Fijian villages.”

The village was in a deep gully below the road. It seemed like an awful location for a village, a place where breezes did not reach and mosquitoes festered. But it was freehold land, and that for the Indo-Fijians was what mattered most.

Saresh dropped me off at a small beach near the Namale Spa & Sanctuary. “It is very dear,” he said as we passed the resort’s entrance. That was Victorian English for “expensive.” I had read that it was owned by Anthony Robbins, the toothy motivational speaker, and that it was frequently booked solid with conventioneers motivated to spend upwards of $2,000 a night. He’s good, that Tony Robbins. My taxi fare, so far, had come to about $4, and as I swam I wondered if I would have enjoyed my swim more if I’d paid an additional $1,996. I’d probably enjoy it less, I thought, particularly as it was by then overcast. Foolishly, I failed to put on sunscreen, and when Saresh picked me up exactly one hour later, it was with some exasperation that I realized I was burned. Thank goodness, I thought, that at least I hadn’t paid $2,000 for the privilege of getting a sunburn on an overcast day.

I asked Saresh what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.

“During the coup, it was very bad. They attacked all the Indian houses here. They take the cattle and the goats and the chickens. They take the women. They even took the Air Fiji pilots hostage. It was not so bad in Savusavu, but here,” he said, gesturing toward the hills and the Indian farms, “it was very bad. And in Lambasa, it was also very bad.”

Lambasa was a town in the north of Vanua Levu. It was largely an Indian town, and since the coup, many of its inhabitants had drifted to Suva looking for work. This had been a region for growing sugarcane, a precarious industry in the best of times. Since the coup, however, many Fijian landowners had declined to renew the leases of Indo-Fijian sugarcane farmers. Expelled from the land their families had farmed for generations, the farmers found themselves in an unenviable situation.

“For me it is too late,” Saresh said. “I will die in Fiji. But for my children, I tell them to study. They must study, get degrees, and then they can emigrate.”

Why couldn’t we all just get along? I thought. Perhaps we could just blame the British for Fiji’s predicament. After all, it was they who had brought the Indians—coolies is what they called them—to Fiji. The British had needed Fiji to pay for itself, and rather than disrupt traditional Fijian society, they had decided to import workers from abroad to till the soil. Fijian and Indian cultures are disparate, to say the least. And yet, Fiji had been an independent country for more than thirty years. That these two peoples could not reconcile themselves to each other was a failure of their leaders.

A SHORT WHILE LATER,
I found myself at the Captain’s Café in Savusavu, admiring a framed note hanging on the wall. It was from Brooke Shields, who had apparently enjoyed her meal there. Some of Fiji’s higher-end resorts were on Vanua Levu. Would Brooke Shields stay in a resort? I wondered. No, I figured. She probably visited Savusavu on a yacht. Such were the depths of my thoughts when a Fijian man joined me at my table overlooking the harbor.

“Bula,” he said. “I am Bill.”

He wore a formal sulu, the sort typically worn by Fijian men on their way to the Methodist church on Sundays.

“These are the end days,” he informed me.

“Ah…,” I said. “Could be, could be.” I didn’t have any information suggesting otherwise, so I thought it best to remain neutral.

“I was hit on the head,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.

“I see.”

“By a truck.”

“Ah…”

“I was in the army. But I didn’t receive anything. No money. Nothing.”

Clearly, Bill was not one for small talk. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to him, and so I spent a moment nodding thoughtfully, a little nonverbal gesture that I hoped conveyed a sense that I too found this world lamentable.

“So, Bill,” I said. “Savusavu is in the province of Cakaudrove?”

“Yes, Cakaudrove. Then there is Bua and Taveuni. Taveuni is where the high chief is from.”

All coup support areas.

“So you have a chiefly system here,” I said. I found it helpful to feign ignorance, though often enough, it wasn’t much of a feint. The Fijian chiefly system was exasperatingly complex. Even the president of the Great Council of Chiefs, the chief chief, if you will, had recently had to plead his case to a special tribunal of chiefs when he attempted to claim a particular title. A chiefly cousin had also claimed the title. It took months of painstaking research into their respective lineages before the tribunal decided in the chief chief’s favor. This was no small matter, however. An air of latent violence had hung in the air in Fiji as the chiefs sorted through the dispute.

Of course, I wasn’t the only foreigner who had trouble understanding chiefly ways in Fiji. Sylvia’s boss, Rex, had once recounted the story of a freshly arrived diplomat from England.

“She had arrived at a kava ceremony for a chief taking a new title, a very important ceremony,” Rex told us. “Well, this English diplomat is talking and talking to the other diplomats, and she sees this
bure—
a ceremonial meeting hall—with sides that hang nearly to the ground. She sees all these shoes on the outside, so she takes her shoes off, and as she steps inside she sees in front of the chief a big bowl of what looks like muddy water.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yes. The kava. She walks up to it, dips her feet into it, and begins to wash her feet in the kava. A week later, she was reassigned to another country.”

Fijians, as I had already learned, do not have a sense of humor when it comes to their chiefs.

“Yes, we have chiefs here,” Bill continued. “Ratus.”

“What if you have a bad chief?” I asked. “Can the people do anything about it?”

“It is not the Fijian way.”

Which, in my humble opinion, is a problem. George Speight had been a mere front man, the public face of the coup. No commoner in Fiji could topple a democratically elected government without the consent of a few powerful chiefs.

“The problem,” Bill said, looking me in the eye, “is Western influence.”

Oh, well then. Bill was frisky. And which Western influences would those be? Democracy? As a Westerner, I will take the blame for global warming, third-world debt, rising sea levels, war—the big ones, in any case—and Britney Spears. But I don’t think that’s what Bill had in mind. It raised my hackles. But then I thought about it for a moment, and I had to concede that to a certain degree he was right. The chiefly system that exists today is in fact a legacy of colonial English rule. It was the colonists who created the Great Council of Chiefs to further English power. Today, it is often referred to as the Great Council of Thieves. The chiefly system in Fiji was, at worst, a rapacious kleptocracy and, at best, a stubborn, ill-serving adherence to a colonial era that has long since vanished.

And yet, though colonialism and modernity had changed Fiji, the chiefs still fought the battles of yore. There are three traditional chiefly confederations in Fiji, and the coup can best be understood as a battle among the confederations for preeminence. Racial tensions were not so much a cause of the coup as a weapon the chiefs could use to further their ends. George Speight found himself isolated on Nukulau Island not because he overthrew an Indian-led government but because his actions had forced the resignation of Fiji’s president, Ratu Mara, a preeminent chief. Speight would not have survived a day if he had been placed inside the Suva Prison. The Fijian prisoners who were loyal to Ratu Mara would have killed him in an instant.

I asked Bill what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.

“No problem,” he said. “It was very quiet.”

SAVUSAVU WAS A PLACE
to disappear. It was far away. It was uncrowded. It was lush and beautiful. It even smelled nice, with the scent of bougainvillea and hibiscus wafting through the sea air. The town itself wasn’t much to look at. It was merely a length of simple shops that catered to the needs of its inhabitants. But the setting was extraordinary, and it attracted escapists from around the world.