Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji

Chapter Seven: Women's Resistance

187 &+$37(56(9(1 :RPHQnV5HVLVWDQFH In this chapter, the complex world of Fiji’s women is explored with a view to deciphering the circumstances under which women questioned and confronted colonial and patriarchal power. This is a difficult task because the lives of indigenous and migrant women were recorded mainly through the lenses of European and Fijian male elites. While women had a long tradition of household resistance, they did not leave written accounts of their deeds.To borrow from Spivak, “if in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow”.1 Even so, Bronwen Douglas has decoded traces of indigenous female actions even where the archives seem intransigent.2 Such readings require a preparedness to evoke different questions, periodisations, protagonists , and narratives. It also demands the prioritisation of the private over the public, reproduction over production, and the personal over the political.Two kinds of records are available for this task.The first is the seemingly haphazard intervention of women in the colonial record by way of individual acts that required the notification of the Colonial Secretary’s Office.The second is the more generalised reporting (through commissions, reports, and the Proceedings of a Native Council or Council of Chiefs) in which women were discussed as a broad entity in need of special attention by the colonial state. This chapter juxtaposes these sources in two broad sections representing two major groups of women whose experience of colonialism was similar but separate.The first group is overwhelmingly indigenous Fijian and was largely confined to the villages, while the second is overwhelmingly indentured from India and was confined to plantations. Their combined actions will test another orthodoxy: that women were mere bystanders on history’s highway. 188 chapter 7 :RPHQLQWKH9LOODJHV Village women in Fiji have traditionally been represented as “beasts of burden ”.3 Images of a submissive, passive, ever-toiling, duty-bound, morally vulnerable woman abound: Fijian women, being from ancient tradition and practice regarded as mere chattels and slaves, submit to a life of hardship and hard work.They cook, fish, gather and carry firewood, draw water, dig and carry home the food from the plantations, weed gardens, and plait mats for which they have gathered and prepared the material, make and mend nets, and manufacture pottery.They also do much work in connection with solevus (festivals) and boses (councils) in providing presents of native cloth and other native goods; and perform a score of other duties from which they have no escape and little respite.4 According to the 1896 report on the decrease in the Fijian population, Fijian men conceived of a good wife as “a yalewa dau tei, dau qoli, dau cakacaka ”, or “a woman who always plants, always fishes, and always works”.5 The household and garden were the primary sites where women cultivated a sense of personhood, obedience, duty, order, morality, sexuality, and their work ethic. It was also in these domestic spheres that village women mounted their most important challenges. It was previously argued (see chapter five) that the decade following Cession created a temporary power vacuum that provided space for ordinary people to seek change for their own advancement. Women were particularly prominent in this endeavour and actively challenged institutions such as marriage , subverted conventions about fertility, and broke laws regarding movement out of villages. In these ventures they faced their fathers, husbands, and chiefs and a formidable adversary in the shape of the Bose Vakaturaga. 0DUULDJH The early years of the Bose Vakaturaga are striking by their unusually long and recurring discussions about marriage. In 1877, chiefs and native magistrates acknowledged that the new laws were helping eliminate “the evils arising from the bad state of marriage customs and regulations in former times”.6 This was helped in large measure by the provisions for divorce in British law, which some women availed themselves of to break out of ill-assorted marriages.7 In the years that followed, however, the number of applications for divorce rose so dramatically that a large number of women were now living independent Figure 7.1. Fijian fisherwomen. (Ref.: CP 10253. Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.) 190 chapter 7 lives. Serious concerns were raised about the adverse effect this was beginning to have on the health of the indigenous population. In 1883, a...