Reviewed by Sjoerd R. Jaarsma
(Centre for Pacific and Asian Studies)

 
The coup attempt in May 2000 left few people in doubt of the image of Fiji as a Third World nation torn asunder by racial tensions. For a few weeks the events in Suva wrote headlines across the world and almost daily the violence was there for all to see. While Fidschi: Das Ende eines Südseeparadieses (Fiji: The End of a South Sea Paradise) will certainly not be the last book to be written about these events, it certainly is one of the more insightful analyses.

The book is written in a fairly accessible style for a general audience. This notwithstanding it is an ambitious book. Though Hermann Mückler builds his argument around the recent coup, most of the book is a step-by-step historical exploration of how present-day Fiji took shape from the earliest European contacts in 1643 onwards. While one would expect the problem of current racial tensions to be the result of the historical introduction of Indian labour recruits on the island, Mückler shows this to be too easy an answer.

In the first few chapters of the book Mückler introduces the reader to pre-colonial Fiji, and shows how the first European contacts changed not only the local balance of power but its very currency. Interesting here is the wide-focused lens that he applies, looking not only at Fiji itself but also at its involvement with neighbouring island groups and colonising agents like Britain. Britain's acceptance of Fiji as a crown colony in 1874 more or less finalises a process that started with the increase in trade in the 19th century and the arrival of the first European settlers on the islands from the 1860s onwards. By then one of the main roots of the present-day problems is already taking shape: the different appreciations of land, landownership, and the power resulting from the control of land.

The growing settler economy on Fiji created an ever increasing demand for contract labour. Though this demand was first met from within the Pacific, from 1879 onwards Indian labourers are brought to the Fiji Islands. In total over 60,000 Indians would be brought to Fiji and several thousands more would follow them as free immigrants and settlers. Most of these immigrants would settle on Fiji after termination of their contract. A higher birth rate among the Indo-Fijian population meant that by the end of World War II both ethnic groups would be equally large. Tensions largely revolve around scarce land resources with the ethnic Fijians reinforcing their traditional appreciation of land and the Indo-Fijians pressing for long-term leases on the land they farm.

In the second half of the book Mückler increasingly focuses on the political discourse developing after World Word II against this background of ethnic dualism. Following Fiji's decolonisation in 1970 Fijian politics increasingly begin to shape themselves in terms of ethnic opposition, while still revolving - as Mückler convincingly shows - around different appreciations of land (chiefly power versus economical profit). This basic opposition, together with various issues of inequality dating back to the colonial era, can be traced right through to the coup of May 2000.

This brief summary does no real justice to the scope of Mückler's argument. Also, in his brief references to the larger issue of ethnic tension in the Pacific as a whole his argument is compelling, though less convincing as it reduces much of the local complexity in the Solomon Islands and in Papua New Guinea, the examples he specifically mentions. This is but one of several issues that might have benefited from a bit more attention. Mückler's entire argument looks at history with a strong ethnic-Fijian perspective, and in that respect the European (settlers, missionaries, etc.) and to a certain extent also the Indo-Fijian perspectives remain underexposed. As I said at the start, the book is written for a general audience and is ambitious in its scope. I cannot escape the impression that these two characteristics clash in this case. The subject of the book, the broad strokes in which the argument is presented, and the lack of referencing throughout the book make it one explicitly written for a general audience. Yet, I cannot escape the notion that the entire scope of what Mückler explores in the book would have been more properly placed in a more extensive historical study with opportunities for a more thorough exploration of the various sidelines he develops to his argument. In that respect, while I enjoyed reading the book, it also left me a little frustrated.