The colonial obsession with herding citizens into separate, tidy, racial boxes meant that the separation and management of Fijian mixed-bloods in relation to their natural families was often a haphazard operation and a bizarre, sometimes harsh experience. It is something that is seldom discussed among those who were ‘ethnically’ at the receiving end of such treatment.
The management of ‘ambiguous’ Fijians was conducted in ways that involved the systematic carving-up of Fijian society into elites, commoners, half-castes or Part-Europeans. For example under certain colonial conditions a half-caste child born of a Fijian chiefly mother and a European or half-caste father could be deemed a Fijian chiefly ‘elite’ with land rights and colonial privileges; another child from the same family could be deemed a commoner with no land rights and a village-bound existence; while yet another could be judged to be a Part-European and allowed to live in town with rights to private property and a Western way of life. At certain points in a mixed-blood’s life it was not uncommon to receive different treatment (sometimes different race classification) to another member of the same family since physical appearance played a major role in determining racial belonging, with those most resembling Europeans having the greater privileges.
Some kailoma who were reared as Fijian children in their maternal villages later ‘progressed’ to a half-caste status after being encouraged away from their families by missionaries and given a missionary or Western education. Some ‘progressed’ even further to the status of quasi-whites (Part-European) who could be employed in the government or private sector and allowed to live in the towns. A select few became ‘sponsored’ whites and were sent abroad for schooling, sometimes returning home as strangers to a villager mother and an extended clan of full-descent and mixed-descent clan members. The legacy of such social engineering has had far-reaching effects among Fijians divided in this way to determine a child’s life chances. The major difference was the way that the system determined place of residence (village or town); participation in the colonial economy; and significantly, eligibility for inclusion in the native land register or Vola ni Kawa Bula (VKB)[1] and recognition as a ‘real’ Fijian.
Much of this activity was conducted in a spirit of goodwill that separated family members along the lines of skin colour, geography, rank, education and cultural competence. This mechanism followed imperial England’s patriarchal system that ignored the legitimate status of a Fijian woman in her tribe; her right to inherit and bequeath land; and her right to raise her children as full members of her clan. Thus, at every point in our history the lives of kailoma Fijian mixed-bloods were scrutinised and carefully managed in the ordering of colonial society.
Spearheading the mustering of ‘stray’ half-castes into central observable locations were the state-approved Christian missions which in the early 19th century established themselves doing God’s work among the Fijian chiefs and their people. Of greatest influence were the Wesleyans and Roman Catholics Marist missionaries who, as agents of the state, were given a virtual free rein to evangelise. Missionaries were charged with the elevation and management of half-caste children from plantations and squatter settlements in rural pockets into centralised day and boarding schools.
Europeans widely regarded mixed-bloods as debased, contaminated or immoral. To many whites, half-castes were the products of a regrettable union and the confronting evidence of white men’s weakness towards native women. Half-caste children were thus inculcated with Christian values at an early age and taught English in a highly disciplined environment at church-run native mission boarding schools great distances from a child’s home. The intensification of this mission increased from 1936 to 1970 following a government report that recommended closer supervision and training of half-castes at the earliest possible age and preferably away from their native mothers and natural families.[2] This drive coincided with colonial alarm at the steady increase of the half-caste population that threatened to swamp European interests in their own colony. A schizophrenic relationship thus developed where half-castes came under the direct control of whites in an authoritarian atmosphere that variously tolerated, ostracised and assimilated half-castes into European schools. Controlled habitation, family monitoring and regular home visits were part of this state/religious campaign to instill white ways in half-castes and assimilate them towards accepting European domination.
In much of Fiji’s colonial literature, the perilous lives of the early European settlers and their mixed-blooded/kailoma offspring have sadly escaped the history books in the recording of frontier history. Typically, the main players in Fijian history have been European administrators, Fijian elites and Fiji-Indian leaders, a prevalent theme to this day.
As many kailoma will attest, our lives have been remarkably altered by the fickle hand of time. We know that both culture and the negotiation of a cultural identity are ongoing processes that can dramatically alter a life at different times and places. We know that as we move back and forth among other cultures and worldviews, we adjust our values and behaviours accordingly. We know that deep inside we are the same person of yesteryear, yet we have been permanently affected by this fluctuation of an identity that makes us quite different people from before. For instance, we see this change occurring in our European forebears who arrived in Fiji in the early 19th century, who took Fijian wives, who gave birth to a different-looking individual from themselves and their husbands, and this child being the inheritor of cultural and linguistic influences from both parents.
Because the fabric of our present is stitched deeply into our past, it is critical to view history as a two-way channel that can explain things about the way people lived and the rules that governed their lives. So it is worth reflecting on the neglected history of those who hail from Fiji’s kailoma community in order to assess the powerful legacy bequeathed by our Fijian and European forebears during early white settlement and into the colonial era.
At this point, I wish to provide a brief outline of my family history as a way of explaining human interaction and diversity in the Fijian landscape. In this short story of my father, William Henry de Bruce and his European and Fijian forebears, I seek to illustrate how the mechanism of racial thinking operated in a colonial state and how certain individuals challenged, and continue to challenge, the very rules upon which the concept of ‘race’ depended. This ‘sociography’ depicts the quality of life of a Fijian kailoma/mixed-blood born in 1917 during British colonialism.
Little is known about this period between 1881 and 1911 when miscegenation between whites and non-whites was at its peak, and subsequently when this population began to interbreed and steadily outnumber Europeans between 1921-1946 to the present day. The story of this racially-mixed Part-European/Fijian born in 1917 tells us about ‘life on the border’ for someone who recounts what it was like to live ambiguously under a system that could not account for a person’s racial hybridity nor their routine interactions with members of their natural families.
It shows how the mechanism of race functioned across colonial Fiji and how the lives of half-castes were closely monitored and manipulated in the ordering of Fiji society. The outstanding feature of this narrative is the creativity and fluidity of racially mixed/kailoma Fijians as border-crossers between all aspects of their racially mixed heritage and between other ethnic groups. This chapter shows the great difficulty in creating single races and maintaining them within tightly controlled ethnic borders when the very large presence of racially mixed people like William Henry de Bruce continue to defy racial thinking in Fiji. This begs an important constitutional question: are such persons at risk of having ‘no race’ in a land obsessed with ‘race’?
The following narrative highlights the quality of relationships between two distinct cultures, Fijians and Europeans who, for whatever reason (food, sex, guns, concubines) found mutual benefit and intimacy at a certain place and time. Inspirationally, it shows that the life of an ordinary Fijian citizen can be as compelling as that of a prominent citizen. I especially seek to fill a wide gap in Fijian-European interactions and to provide a fresh look at the peopling of the South Pacific.