British Documents on the End of Empire. Series B, Volume 10: Fiji (review)

This volume presents formerly secret and confidential dispatches, reports, and correspondence produced by British colonial officials in London and Suva as they prepared Fiji for its independence. Editor Brij V Lal's task was to examine a vast range of documents, select a limited number for publication, and write an introductory review. The one hundred eighty-one items included cover the period from 1955 to 1970, when independence was granted. In his introduction, Lal reviews issues, actions, and trends in the period, against the backdrop of Fiji's development as a colonial society. He describes the process of dialogue and debate between London and Fiji and within the London office itself, the meetings between London officials and the political leaders of Fiji, and the preparations for the two constitutional conferences in London in 1965 and 1970.

The officials faced the daunting challenge of dealing with conflicts and fears in Fiji arising from the profound ethnic divide that their predecessors had created. Lengthy dispatches to London by various governors reported on the political situation, the leading personalities and their aspirations and difficulties, and the contentious issues. The documents produced in London illuminate the political pressures, domestic and international, that influenced the directives given to the governors, and the decision making for ending colonial rule.

The documents reveal the great extent to which official assessments and decisions were influenced by the demands of the indigenous Fijian chiefly establishment. The authority of that elite, strengthened by administrative changes in the 1940s, had encouraged their sense of entitlement to political privilege. The high chiefs, led by Ratu Mara (later Fiji's first prime minister), and strongly supported by the Fijian people, insisted that any change must have their approval and secure the Fijians and their lands against the possibility of Indian domination.

The London officials initially hoped to replace the communal system of political representation in which electorates and seats were ethnically defined, by a common franchise without reservation of seats, a reform that Indian leaders had long advocated and which the United Nations was demanding. However the Fijian leaders were initially opposed even to the idea of self-government, as were their old allies, the local Europeans, who as a tiny minority had long feared the Indians' economic and demographic advance.

The officials soon abandoned their plan for a common franchise, fearing that to attempt such a radical change would alienate the Fijians and risk a violent ethnic conflict that would be difficult to control given the Fijian predominance in the police and army. They became resigned to working toward self-government within a system of ethnic group representation favoring the Fijians. The outcome of the first constitutional conference in 1965 affirmed this approach, much to the anger of the Indian leaders.

The colonial governor, who had recently served in Sarawak, encouraged Ratu Mara to form a multiethnic political party modeled on the Alliance Party in Malaya. Mara's Alliance Party, based mainly on the Fijian Association, insisted on preservation of the communal political system. Yet it achieved substantial multiethnic support, whereas the Federation Party (later National Federation Party), which condemned the communal system, remained an almost entirely Indian organization. The documents illuminate the emergence of Ratu Mara as the dominant political figure, a man of formidable intelligence and personality who sometimes alarmed the British officials by his angry moods when thwarted. His relationship to the fluctuating force of Fijian nationalist sentiment remained ambivalent. At times he aligned with it, at other times was under threat from it, and occasionally exploited it to strengthen his influence with the British as the indispensable leader who could restrain it.

The governor allowed the Alliance Party to take the reins of government on many matters following its victory in the 1966 election. This provoked the...