The miracle in Suva

There was a South Pacific communication miracle in Suva in 1950, the year of the first South Pacific Conference. The conference was an offshoot of the South Pacific Commission, created in 1947 by metropolitan governments with colonial interests in the South Pacific to promote the welfare of the people of their territories.

The commission was basically paternalistic, and at the first South Pacific Conference, which was the means chosen to give the inhabitants of the territories a chance to say their piece without first seeking consent, official advisers sat behind each one of the delegates who were ostensibily their country’s mouthpiece. Thus the conference proceedings were very largely an exercise in benevolent puppetry.

But it was not in the conference room that the miracle occurred. It took place in the dining rooms and recreation halls, in the dormitories, on the verandahs and lawns where the delegates gathered in the off hours, and in the homes of Fijians in Suva where they were entertained.

In all these places, to their growing surprise and great delight, the delegates began to realise how much they had in common. As they talked together, sang together and danced together or for each other, they discovered exciting links of languages and music and culture and ancestral origins and the delegates carried back with them to their scattered homes the glimmering of a revelation that has helped to produce a revolution.

This has transformed the people of the Pacific territories from powerless puppets into vocal and forceful spokesmen for themselves and for the increasing number of independent nations they reperesent. - From a paper included in Mainly About Fiji Len Usher. □ □ □ The process begun at the first South Pacific Conference continued at the first South Pacific Games in 1963 and the first South Pacific Festival of Arts in 1972, both also held in Suva. It was accelerated at Lae, Papua New Guinea, in 1965 when Fiji delegate Ratu K.K. T. Mara led a demand for a greater direct voice of the people of the region in the South Pacific Commission. - Mainly About Fiji.