Publication: Oceania
Publication Date: 01-SEP-05
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Cretton, Viviane
Article Excerpt
When the coup d'Etat took place on the 19th of May, 2000, more than thirty Fijian and Indo-Fijian members of parliament were taken hostage. They were released on the 13th of July. That day, around 6pm, the local radio station 96FM broadcast the event live from the occupied parliament building. His voice tinged with emotion, the Fijian journalist Malakai Veisamasama described the moment that people had been hoping for for nearly two months. Pinned to the radio in my apartment in Samabula, I was particularly intrigued when he spoke of the 'emotional moment' when Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry (1) drank a bowl of kava offered to him by George Speight, the apparent leader of the coup d'Etat, who had held him captive in the Fijian parliament. According to the radio report, at dusk on that day in July 2000 a yaqona ceremony was presented to the hostages before they were released as a sign of apology, and Mahendra Chaudhry was the first to drink from the cup. Three days later, the Fiji's Daily Post reported that the deposed Prime Minister had accepted a tabua (the tooth of a whale) and a bowl of kava, signifying that he forgave the man who had held him hostage for 56 days ('Fiji waits for axe to fall', Daily Post, July 16, 2000:4). Yet in an interview with the Fiji Sun in August, Poseci Bune, the former Minister for Agriculture, who had been one of the hostages, denied that any ceremony of apology had been presented by George Speight to the hostages:
No, there wasn't any Fijian ceremony or any sort of matanigasau
done at all. We heard and read about it the next day. But it's not
true at all. (...) In fact what had happened that many could have
mistaken as the ceremony of forgiveness was that a few minutes--or
the last hour before we were released, we were having a grog session among ourselves. George Speight came down and joined us and
Ligairi came in the last 30 minutes before Duvuloco came in (Poseci
Bune quoted in Fiji Sun, August 18, 2000:8). During these events, I was initially bent on pursuing the question of the occurrence of the ceremony presented to the hostages prior to their liberation: did it take place or not? Had Speight presented a tabua to Chaudhry? Was this a matanigasau or not? I should note here that Fijian tradition includes a range of ceremonies of reconciliation (i soro). Rituals are performed according to the type of offense committed. I will be concerned with the matanigasau, which, according to Capell (1991:202), was in earlier times the ritual employed to seek forgiveness in cases of negligence in carrying out official duties, and which today involves the presentation of a tabua. Often held to be of sacred origin, the tabua has a strong symbolic significance in Fiji. Its social valorization is such that a request involving the presentation of a whale's tooth is rarely refused (Sahlins 1962:199), tabua being 'the highest form of Fijian wealth offered to the most powerful being' (Ravuvu 2000:1). To drink a cup of kava and accept a tabua presented during a ritual, signifies an acceptance of the purpose of the exchange (Ravuvu 1983, 2000). According to current usage, the matanigasau is a ceremony which aims to restore peace and harmony to the heart of the vanua (land and its inhabitants, understood here as the most extended family group):
The matanigasau ... it's a specific ceremony to address a breaking down in relationships. It can resolve anything, from the killing of someone to running away with his daughter. It can also resolve some cases where you just have some tensions (Interview with Ram Rakuita Vakalalabure, Deputy Speaker, House of Representatives, September 3, 2002, Suva). Other ceremonies of pardon also exist, such as the bulubulu, which occurs in cases of injury, particularly in cases of rape or domestic violence.
I propose in this article to reflect on the notion of tradition in Fiji, taking up the question of the ceremony of apology that the hostage takers are said to have presented to more than thirty Fijian and Indo-Fijian parliamentarians, women and men, but which the hostages whom I met upon returning to the field in 2002 said never took place. The dissection of this specific moment of Fijian history reveals a dispute about the meaning of reconciliation. As Linnekin suggests, 'talking about culture is intrinsically controversial; the personal and political stakes are too high. Visions of tradition are profoundly bound up with our informants' sense of cultural and personal identity--and with our own' (1992:259-260). A subject of dispute, as much for the social actors as for anthropologists, the notion of tradition that I piece together is born of the encounters I experienced in the field. It appears as just such an object of negotiation--between interlocutors, but equally between the interlocutors and the anthropologist--and allows me to explore the stakes at once empirical and epistemological that shape it.
TRADITIONAL APOLOGY AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR POLITICAL MANOEUVRING
In their recent book, Kelly and Kaplan (2001) report the ceremony presented to the hostages prior to their release as an i soro: ... Speight did not release the hostages before conducting a final
ritual, what ethnic Fijians call a soro, a ritual of apology. Isireli Vuibau, a Labour Party member of Parliament and fellow hostage, acted as matanivanua, 'herald' or 'talking chief', for deposed Prime Minister Chaudhry. Vuibau accepted the apology. The
first bowl of yaqona was passed to Chaudhry and Chaudhry drank it,
a culminating moment in a soro (Kelly and Kaplan 2001:143-144). The interpretation of the ceremony proposed by Kelly and Kaplan is based on internet media news recalling that given by the supporters of George Speight. From my own interviews in 2002, the interpretations are multiple and diverse. Malakai Veisamasama--a journalist taken as hostage and quoted by Kelly and Kaplan (2001:144)--confirmed for me that a yaqona ceremony had taken place before the release of the hostages, and that Chaudhry had accepted the cup offered to him, but that it was neither part of a matanigasau, nor an i soro, as Kelly and Kaplan have claimed, no tabua presentation having been made:
The presentation was done by George Speight and his group, there
was no tabua at all, to inform Chaudhry and the hostages that they
will be going to be released today.... the presentation he told to Chaudhry and the hostages was to say that 'today you will be
released and we hope that you forgive us for what has happened,
but I hope that you understand our cause.' That was the presentation that was done. There was no tabua at all (Interview with Malakai Veisamasama, Suva, 14 July 2002). The many different versions of the ceremony that I have collected bring into question the notion of tradition in Fiji. It is not, as such, the truth about this ceremony that is important for my analysis, but the fact that the various social actors involved do not agree about its occurrence. On an empirical level, this particular controversy illustrates the way in which some nationalist parties--such as Matanitu Vanua (the Conservative Alliance Party), a new party launched by partisans of George Speight in the run up to the 2001 elections--have made use of traditional ceremonies for political ends. At the same time, it permits me to locate the discourses of their opponents, those who defended the democratic constitutional law of Fiji and who are not necessarily in agreement with the interpretation made of the ceremony. On an epistemological level, the controversy allows me to reflect on 'the mobilisation of custom' in a situation of conflict and exacerbated nationalism, thereby taking into account the dynamics that are inherent in new forms of government in decolonized Pacific states (Hamelin and Wittersheim 2002:11).
The political controversy surrounding the apology presented or not to the...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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