Rooted in Sugar, Raised in Silence

I wasn’t raised to speak loudly about Fiji. Like many mixed Fijian women, I inherited my history in fragments: in food, in silences, in broken family stories softened to make them survivable. Colonialism, after all, does not end when the flag is lowered; it lingers in what we are taught not to say, not to question, not to grieve.

Fiji is often sold as a paradise, with its turquoise water, white sand, smiling melanated faces trained to perform welcome. This narrative is not accidental. It is the final product of over a century of colonial engineering, economic extraction, racial stratification, and cultural rebranding. To understand Fiji honestly, its land, its people, its fractures, we need to interrogate the violence beneath the postcard or fridge magnet.

This is not an objective history. It is a lived one.

Land as Kin, Not Commodity

Prior to European contact, Fiji was not a monolith but a constellation of complex, interrelated societies. Indigenous iTaukei systems were rooted in vanua: a concept that defies direct English translation. Vanua is land, yes, but also people, ancestors, spirituality, social obligation, and ecological stewardship. Land was not owned in the Western sense; it was held collectively, relationally, and with responsibility to both past and future generations.

Power structures existed (chiefdoms, hierarchies, intertribal conflict) but these systems were internally coherent and adaptive. Women held varied roles across regions, from agricultural authority to spiritual leadership. Gender was not egalitarian, but nor was it flattened into Victorian binaries of domestic womanhood and public masculinity. Colonialism did not arrive to “civilise” Fiji. It arrived to simplify it into something extractable.

The British Empire and the Legalisation of Theft

In 1874, Fiji was formally ceded to the British Crown. This moment is often framed as strategic or protective; as an attempt to prevent exploitation by other colonial powers. In reality, it inaugurated a regime of bureaucratised dispossession.

The British implemented indirect rule through chiefs, selectively empowering certain male leaders while marginalising others, particularly women and non-conforming power holders. Customary systems were frozen into rigid legal frameworks, stripping them of flexibility and weaponising “tradition” against the very people it once served.

Land was surveyed, mapped, and categorised; not to understand it, but to control it.

While most Indigenous land was “technically” protected from outright sale, this “protection” came with a caveat: iTaukei people were prohibited from fully participating in the cash economy, ensuring dependence while appearing benevolent. Economic stagnation was framed as cultural preservation. Poverty was repackaged as “authenticity”. This is one of colonialism’s most insidious tricks: to deny opportunity while blaming culture for the resulting inequality.

Indenture and the Architecture of Racial Division

Perhaps the most enduring scar of British rule in Fiji is the introduction of indentured labour. Between 1879 and 1916, over 60,000 Further Polynesians were brought to Fiji under the girmit system to work on sugar plantations owned primarily by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. These labourers endured brutal conditions, corporal punishment, sexual violence, and social isolation. Many never returned home.

This was not incidental suffering; it was industrial design.

The British deliberately constructed Fiji as a racially segmented society: Indigenous Fijians tied to land but excluded from economic power, Indo-Fijians exploited for labour but denied belonging, and Europeans positioned as administrators and beneficiaries. Divide and conquer was not a metaphor or exaggeration, it was policy.

As a mixed Fijian woman, I carry this history in my blood. I am the embodiment of a colonial contradiction: proof that these divisions were always artificial, yet punished as if they were natural law.

Women, especially, bore the cost. Polynesian and Indo Fijian women were subjected to extreme sexual violence under indenture, while Indigenous women saw their autonomy eroded by imported Christian morality and British patriarchal norms. Colonialism didn’t just merely exploit women’s labour; it re-scripted womanhood itself, narrowing acceptable roles and punishing resistance.

christianity & gender

Christianity arrived in Fiji before formal colonisation, but under British rule it became institutionalised, moralised, and disciplinary. Indigenous spiritual practices, many of which centred women as healers, mediators, and knowledge keepers, were demonised or erased. Sexuality was policed. Dress was regulated. Shame was introduced where there had once been pride and community.

For women, this meant a double bind: we were idealised as cultural bearers while being denied authority over culture’s evolution. The “good Fijian woman” became quiet, pious, accommodating: an image that served both colonial governance and later nationalist narratives. Even today, gender-based violence in Fiji cannot be disentangled from this legacy. When control over women’s bodies is sanctified by religion and tradition selectively interpreted through colonial lenses, violence becomes normalised as discipline rather than recognised as harm.

independence isn’t real without liberation and an apology

Fiji gained independence in 1970. But independence is not the same as decolonisation. The postcolonial state inherited colonial economic structures: reliance on sugar exports, tourism, and foreign investment. Land remained spiritually central but economically constrained. Racialised politics (engineered by the British Empire) continued to destabilise governance, culminating in multiple coups that disproportionately harmed women, the poor, and ethnic minorities.

Tourism, now one of Fiji’s largest industries, is a particularly elegant continuation of colonial extraction. Our land is marketed as untouched, our people as eternally cheerful, our culture as consumable performance. Indigenous bodies become part of the landscape: smiling accessories to luxury experiences few locals can afford. Women dominate the lowest-paid sectors of this economy: hospitality, domestic labour, informal markets. We are visible everywhere and powerful almost nowhere.

mixed up

To be mixed in Fiji is to be constantly asked to justify your belonging. Colonial racial categories hardened identities that were once fluid. Blood quantum replaced kinship. Bureaucracy replaced relationship. You are never just Fijian; you are hyphenated, qualified, questioned. The trace of the British lingers, even for the generations that follow.

For women, this scrutiny is amplified. Our bodies become sites where racial anxiety, cultural purity, and national identity collide. We are told to preserve tradition while embodying modernity, to be resilient but not angry, proud but not disruptive. Yet, my mixedness is not dilution. It is evidence of survival.

For me, feminism is not imported or modern theory or practice; it is ancestral memory reclaimed. A decolonial Fijian feminism insists on land justice, gender justice, and racial justice as inseparable. It recognises that the exploitation of women’s bodies, Indigenous land, and migrant labour are expressions of the same logic: extract, control, discard. It challenges the idea that culture is static, especially when “tradition” is used to silence women while ignoring its colonial reshaping. It honours our grandmothers not by freezing them in time, but by continuing their work in a differing environment.

Colonialism leaves behind infrastructure, yes, but also trauma encoded into policy, family dynamics, gender norms, and economic dependency. It leaves behind beauty curated for export and pain hidden for convenience.

But it also leaves behind resistance.

Every Fijian woman who speaks ~ especially those of us who exist in the in-between~ is part of an unfinished reckoning. Our histories are not footnotes. Our voices are not ornamental. And our land is not a backdrop.