A village that needs approval to enter
As sailors planning to spend a couple of months exploring Fiji’s outer islands, my family of three needed to be well-prepared. We had fishing gear, staple foods and a first aid kit with remedies for everything from sunburn to jellyfish stings. We also had a few sarong-type wraps called sulas and a big pile of earthysmelling roots called kava.
Kava, known locally as yaqona, is a mild analgesic and stress reliever made from the root of the piper methstyicum plant. It’s also an important part of Fijian culture. Custom holds that a visitor needs to ask permission to enter a village, explaining their friendly intentions and offering a tangled bundle of kava roots as sevusevu, a gesture of respect. Much the way a Western guest brings a bottle of wine to the host of a dinner party, I’d assumed.
In truth, in deeply ritualized Fijian society, sevusevu sets up a more complex relationship between the host and the hosted. When a visitor has their sevusevu accepted, they become part of the larger village family. By receiving something back - usually sharing in grog (the kava root mixed with water) - the visitor acknowledges this obligation. In some villages, the ancient ritual has died out, while in others it’s not much more than a money-making tourism activity. Our best chance for experiencing an authentic ceremony, we were told, was to visit the small, isolated villages in Fiji’s outer islands.
“Do you think this is a sevusevu village?” my daughter Maia asked as we looked at the thatch and brick houses of Nabouwala village on the island of Vanua Levu. The previous two villages we’d stopped in hadn’t been, but once again we dressed in our sulas and set off for shore with our ungainly bouquet of kava to avoid any potential disrespect.
In Nabouwala, we asked some children for the turaga-ni-koro, or chief, and they escorted us past small homes and tidy gardens to the ubiquitous rugby match, where they presented us to Waisea, the headman. Waisea told us the chief - an elderly woman of 97 - would indeed receive our sevusevu. He tutored us on the custom’s protocol, but after trying to teach my husband Evan the complex string of Fijian, we decided that Waisea should speak on our behalf.
So Waisea called out the traditional greeting (instead of knocking) outside the chief ’s thatched bure, or meeting house, and had us slip off our shoes, hats and sunglasses. We entered the room and were seated on a woven grass mat in front of a tiny, smiling woman with a halo of white hair.
Andisolmbe is one of the few female chiefs in Fiji. And despite