Decline And Revival Of Fijian Race

What Was Achieved by Sympathetic British Administration

J T is fitting that the remarkable story of the decline and recovery of the Fijian race—which is typical of the story of most of the South Pacific islands native races—should be told by Dr. V. W. T. McGusty, CMG QBE who retired recently after a lifetime of distinguished service as Chief Medical Officer in Fiji and Secretary for Indian Affairs in Fiji. The following article appeared in September in “Health Horizon;’ an excellent new quarterly now being published in London: y

WHEN two fundamentally differing

civilisations meet for the first time, danger of extinction is brought urgently to the weaker and more ancient by new infectious diseases against which its people have little resistance, and by too abrupt a change in their age-old habits of living.

This story tells of the white man’s first entry into a new land; of how harmful factors in the form of new dis seases and new ways of living spread among its primitive people and threat ened them with extinction in advance of the benefits of the new civilisation; and of how those people were ultimately saved by teaching them how to achieve their salvation by their own efforts.

The prosperous island Crown Colony of Fiji, which straddles the 180th degree of longitude (that global line which marks where time is twelve hours dif ferent from Greenwich time) is well suited for such a story because the whole history of its contact with the white man is limited to the last century and a half.

AS a preface to the story of Fiji, brief mention must be made of the four geographico-racial groups found in the Pacific.

The first of these, Polynesia or “the many islands,” includes among other places Hawaii, where the battle of Pearl Harbour was fought, and Samoa, where Robert Louis Stevenson lived his last years, and it lies to the east of the 180°

longitude. The Polynesians are a light skinned, intelligent, adventurous race whose wanderings took them as far south as New Zealand to become the renowned Maori people.

The second group, Micronesia or “the small islands,” lies chiefly to the west of the 180th degree and to the north of the equator and its inhabitants, the Micronesians. are more Asiatic in their physical characteristics than the Polyne sians.

The third group was called Melanesia because of the relatively dark colour of its people. It also lies west of longitude 180°, and it is to the south of Micronesia.

Situated at the eastern extremity of Melanesia, Fiji is in a racial sense the mixing bowl of the Polynesian, Microne sian and Melanesian peoples.

The fourth group, Indonesia, includes the Dutch East Indies and the Philippine Islands and lies far away to the west in close contact with Asia.

Although differing greatly from one another in many ways, and widely sep arated by great ocean spaces an associ ation between the four groups of the Pacific peoples extending back into the dawn of time can be traced both in their culture and in their physical form.

An interesting factor in the health of the Pacific Islanders is that owing to a freakish distribution of the anopheles mosquito, all Polynesia, much of Micro nesia, and Fiji are free from malaria.

BEFORE the coming of the white man the Fijian civilisation was neolithic, and the social system was com munal. The Fijians, while of a predom inantly Melanesian stock, show signs of mixture with two other races, and the fusion of culture has given rise to a patrilineal totemistic- tribal community.

The tribes, which were constantly at war with one another, were ruled by hereditary chiefs who, although they were worshipped as gods and endowed with absolute authority, suffered a defin ite curtailment of their powers under a curiously democratic custom which re quired that a chief must be proclaimed publicly before assuming office as the head of his tribe; and further, which incurred the penalty of death for any chief who, in the judgment of the tribal elders, was found guilty of dangerous infringement of the customary laws of his tribe.

In the remarkably self-sufficient society over which the chiefs presided, every individual had a special part to play, and in return for services rendered to the community was assured of the necessaries of his own life.

The system of land tenure was especi ally interesting. It did not involve actual ownership by either chiefs or individuals, but is expressed in the aphorism “the chiefs owned the people and the people owned the land.”

This is not to deny the existence of many malpractices abhorrent to our western ideas - malpractices which in cluded gross cannibalism as well as the habit, whenever a chief died, of strang ling his widows so that his womenfolk might continue their domestic ministra tions in the celestial sphere! Yet judg ment, even in such matters, must be balanced against the fact that the prac tices were condoned by public opinion and carried out under the authority of the chiefs at least with 'a justice born of a broad impartiality.

In these modern Colonial days when the danger is recognised of making too sudden an effort to change the age-long habits of Hying of a whole people, the underlying idea has been to eliminate only the savage and more objectionable features from primitive cultures, while continuing to preserve the better ones in that quasi-autonomous form of ad ministration known as indirect govern ment . . .

NO record exists of white men hawing entered Fiji until the coming of a few hardy seamen adventurers in search of sandalwood in the late 1790’5.

Although the first white men came to exploit and not to settle, it is now estab lished that it was they who began the introduction among the hitherto un affected Fijians of the infectious diseases of the western world.

The spread of these maladies among a people whose society was crumbling under the increasing pressure of Euro pean influences continued unchecked for almost eighty years, until Fiji became a British Crown Colony in 1874. In the very next year, and before the measures taken to control disease could become effective, a single epidemic of measles killed almost a quarter of the already depleted Fijian population, and reduced it to less than half the figure at which it had stood at the coming of the white man.

But, shocking as was the suddenness of this tragedy, it is tuberculosis which has taken the greatest toll of the Fijians over the whole period of contact with the white race.

Side by side with this tragedy, certain other events of a constructive and re generative nature were taking place. The two most important were the conversion

of the Fijians to Christianity, and the union of the tribes under one King.

AFTER the sandalwood traders there followed a very slow infiltration into Fiji of men of European stock, who at firs’t were not of a very desirable class since they were mostly deserters from ships, and survivors from a small batch of convicts who had escaped from one of the penal settlements of Australia.

It was not until 1830 that beneficent influences began to penetrate with the arrival of Christian missionaries, whose first representatives were actually native converts from a neighbouring group of islands. In 1835 the first white mission aries, two Wesleyan Methodists, settled, and were followed by other permanent missionaries, both Methodist and Roman Catholic.

So much uninformed criticism is dir ected against missionaries that justice demands that it be recorded of those who worked in Fiji that, leading lives of great danger and privation, they suc ceeded within the short space of half a century in converting the entire Fijian population to Christianity and in doing so that they endowed this primitive people with a written language which they devised in order to distribute trans lations of the Bible. The first British administrator was greatly indebted to the missionaries for having civilised and pacified the Fijians . . .

If he had time to think, the first Gov ernor of the new British Colony must have regarded his task as insuperable, for he had neither funds nor any visible source of revenue to meet the cost of forming a government and stemming the catastrophic decline of the Fijian race.

His only assets seem to have been the civilisation brought about by the mis sions, the union effected by King Tfiak ombau, and some wise counsellors among whom was William MacGregor, the first medical officer of the new Colony.

And these assets were used to full ad vantage. The new Government was de signed so as to conserve all of the un objectionable features of the native sys tem, and to use the chiefs and native officials as instruments of the Fijian ad ministration.

The problem of disease was met by stringent quarantining of overseas ship ping and by vaccinating the population against smallpox. For the latter duty selected natives were trained and used so successfully that the idea was con ceived in the ingenious mind of Dr. Mac- Gregor of training them in the rudiments of medicine, surgery and public health, and sending them out, after a test exam ination, to practise among their fellow tribesmen with the title of Native Medi cal Practitioner.

From this simple beginning a sub-pro fessional medical service grew up to play a vital part in breaking down super stition, bringing disease under control, and winning the confidence of the Fijians in modern medicine. By the enlargement of the medical school in Fiji the Native Medical Practitioner system has been ex tended to other Pacific administrations, while, as a somewhat more recent, but equally useful development, a school for the training of local nurses has grown up in Fiji along exactly similar lines.

An influential recent innovation is the formation of voluntary women's Welfare Committes in the villages. Thus by a fortunate blending of ingenuity with ex perimentalism the difficult problems of Fiji came to be solved through the prin ciples since recognised as corner stones of Colonial administration, namely in direct government and the use of indi genous personnel, especially on the staff of welfare services.

IT is now clear that the preservation of the social system, acting from a psy chological point of view, played as important a part in preserving the Fijian

race as the employment of sub-professional native doctors and nurses in attacking actual disease from within the tribe; and, further, that success in either direction would not have been attainable without the British Colonial Service.

It is interesting to see by a glance at the changing state of the population the whole picture of decline and recovery in the last century and a half. First the forces of destruction held the field, unchecked, for nearly eighty years. Then Fiji came under British rule; and, soon afterwards, the process of regeneration asserts itself in a- steady lessening of the rate of decline Continued over the next forty-five years until 1919, when the population reached its lowest level of about one-third the figure at which it had stood 120 years earlier when the white man made his appearance.

Thence forward steady upward progress has been so well maintained that, within the space of 25 years, the population has risen again by nearly 40 per cent. above its lowest figure, and the conditions now prevailing are healthy enough fully to justify the assumption that in the absence of any unforseen catastrophe, such as the introduction of malaria, the survival of the Fijian race is well assured.

THE stable government resulting from British rule, led quickly to industrial development, which centred chiefly

in the production of sugar and copra, Next came a demand for labour which could not be molt within the Colony without risk of dangerously upsetting the Fijian social system; and so the Gov ernment turned to India, with whose Government an arrangement was soon made for Indian agriculturalists to emi grate to Fiji,

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'PHIS became effective in the late JL 1870’s, and from those original immi grants who chose to settle in Fiji a large and prosperous community is des cended, whose numbers already exceed the native Fijians, Some people have assumed the exist ence of a sort of racial rivalry as be tween Indian and Fijian, and it has been suggested that the death-knell of the Fijian race would have been sounded if ever its population should be exceeded by the Indian.

However, now when the Indian has actually taken the lead it has also be come clear that the circumstances of the t wo races are so dissimilar that corn parison between them becomes almost pointless. The country is J still under developed and under-populated and will hold, for many years to come, oppor tunities for Indian and Fijian to prosper side by side, and without racial fusion, towards which there has as yet been little tendency,

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Indeed, it is to contend with such div ergencies of population that Crown Colony government has been evolved.

While the system is often criticised as being too autocratic, experience shows that colonial governors have acted with understanding which has encouraged democratic development to take place without sacrificing the interests of the less advanced sections of the community.

FIJI is a small country whose popula tion hardly exceeds 250,000; but it has all of the problems of bigger Colonial administrations.

A much criticised feature of the Brit ish Crown Colony, although it has been somewhat modified since the Colonial Welfare and Development Act, is the principle that each Colony must pay for its services out of its own resources.

But I wonder if this financial strin gency has not at least had the advant age of bringing Briton and Fijian more closely together. From this it is but another step to find in financial self sufficiency the basis of that resourceful ness which is enabling Ceylon, Jamaica, and other Crown Colonies to advance towards complete autonomy.