Knights, Plights & Flights: Pacific Island Communities in Fiji

“Knights, Plights & Flights” documents three Pacific island communities living in Fiji. Nearly all current community members were born in Fiji, and for many, generations of their descendants were born in Fiji as well. These people are outsiders however - third class citizens, landless, with limited voting rights, and unable to access some government programmes reserved for the mainstream. The stories of how these three Pacific communities ended up in Fiji are very different. Many thousands of indentured labourers from the Solomon Islands were commandeered and transported to Fiji in atrocious conditions. The labourers worked on sugar, cotton, and coconut plantations and many stayed in Fiji after their contracts ended. They formed communities with the help of the Anglican Church, whose support to these communities was the keystone of its mission in Fiji. Some 2,000 km. from Fiji lies the island of Banaba, part of Kiribati. In the 1940s the Banaban people were displaced from their island by Japanese invaders, who scattered them to work in labour camps on other Pacific islands. After the war ended, the Banabans were gathered up by the British colonial authorities and placed on Rabi Island in Fiji. The Banaban saga is two stories – one which mirrors the Avatar story of the Na’vi people battling voracious miners. Banaba was an extremely valuable source of phosphate deposits, and over the years, it was mined so extensively that the island was considered uninhabitable – hence the move to Rabi. The second story is the settlement of Rabi. A thousand people placed on a near-virgin island with no infrastructure, soon transformed into a place to live. They were once described as the richest islanders in the Pacific, due to the phosphate mining. The islanders were awarded a substantial amount for the damage done to Banaba Island, but today many live in relative poverty. Finally, the book looks at Rabi’s neighbour, Kioa Island; owned since 1948 by people from Vaitupu, an island of Tuvalu. The story of how this happened is very odd, involving some of the people involved with settling the Banabans on Rabi. The book tells a story of what happens when the views of migrant populations differ from those who remained on the islands of origin. In all the stories, migrants have dealt with Fijian politics, culture, and views, which have seesawed from overtly racist to accommodating, but also the current geopolitics of the region as the World’s superpowers battle to establish footholds in this valuable ocean, and the impact of climate change, which impacts this region substantially. The book examines the evidence supporting the claim that the iTaukei people are the indigenous people of Fiji, with some surprising insights. The book also critiques the performance of the British colonial administrators in the South Pacific, because, in hindsight, it appears that they got so many things fundamentally wrong. The title of the book sums up the last 150 years of Fiji’s Pacific island immigrants. It is about the “flights” - people fleeing their homeland, in some cases voluntarily but often not; it is about the “plights” that the Pacific island migrants find themselves in today - the poverty, the exclusion; and it is about “knights”, those people who received knighthoods for services rendered to their respective countries. Those services have not always been in the interests of the migrant communities. The book does not contain original research. Instead, the author has weaved together the findings of those who are true experts in their fields, whether archaeologists, linguists, folklorists, geologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, or documenters of Pacific culture. The author’s own experience in economic development helps to signpost possible economic futures for the communities, and the role that donors can play in helping attain secure and equitable futures for these peoples.