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FIJI INDIAN POLITIICS
Armed Ali
The needs of the British Empire created the indenture system which saw the migration of thousands of Indians abroad. The precarious social and economic conditions of village India aroused
in Indian minds a desire to seek security and the picture of hope painted by the recruiters’ agents (arkatis) enticed Indians to enter into girmit (the agreement of the indenture system). In the case of Fiji it was the experience of Sir Arthur Gordon, while governor of Mauritius and Trinidad, with indentured labourers, which led to his introducing them into Fiji to assist in implementing his native policy. In the negotiations between Fiji and India, Fiji promised to treat Indians on equal basis with others already domiciled in the colony.
PACIFIC HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN INDIGENOUS VIEW
Malama Meleisa
This paper will have two sections. First I will argue that European preconceptions, intellectual fashions, philosophical, literary and scientific preoccupations, and more
recently concern about colonialism and development have written about the Pacific Islands and whose writings compose the sources of Pacific history. In this text, I will
comment on David’s remark that the history of the Pacific has largely been written as an aspect of European colonial history, focussing mainly on Europeans. This is
understandable considering that indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific had no written records of themselves before the arrival of Europeans. Even after they acquired this
skill, as Gavan Daws noted of the Hawaiians, they did not save the pieces of paper recording their own reactions and views of events going on about them.
WHEN MARX BECAME AN ISLANDER
Reflections on South Pacific radicalism
A lecture delivered during U.S.P. Pacific Week 1978
Sean Regan
There is an old Greek story about an inveterate pessimist: a man who, after thirty years of weariness and tribulation, decided one day that those who thought otherwise
were but fools for their ambitions and emptyhanded pleasures. So, like many before him and since, he sharpened a razor with the intention of slicing it across his wrist. But
before the final act, he resolved, as a last insult to his hated world , to compose a suicide-song explaining to whom-ever might listen, the condition of his misery and the
reason for his satisfaction, he went out into the street to look for an audience.
AMERICAN INFLUENCE ON THE POLITICS OF FIJI,
1849 - 1874
David Routledge
A recent speaker at the South Pacific, referring to the politics of the United States in the Pacific Basin after the Vietnam War, said that his country has confused itself and a
lot of other people about what it is up to. As far as Fiji is concerned, this is a state of affairs which has existed from the time of earliest contact between the two countries.
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