FIJI DAY: VISIONS IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR
THIS FIJI DAY WE REMEMBER OUR OWN TRAGEDIES AND TRIUMPHS.
In a world so threatened by the three Cs:Climate Catastrophe, Coronavirus, China, how does a small nation celebrate a memorable day in its history?
We as school children learnt the three Rs : reading,writing and rithmatic.
And on the blackboard in bold letters was written in fancy calligraphy with red and blue chalks:
Character lost everything lost
We recited it daily but only after singing ‘God Save our gracious Queen .... ’
To these Cs we can add on more: Courage.
I mean a creative courage for character is not only fate but a person’s, a community’s and a country’s future.
Creativity is one’s capacity to reexamine one’s convictions in the light of new knowledge, experience, insights, and the deepening recognition of a larger world.
Your own growth comes from your relationships and your obligations as a person, a citizen of a country, a region, the world. We wither into wisdom of the ages.
It’s our capacity to grow old gracefully when the past, the present and the future coalesce in your life: to help you to understand the rapidly changing and challenging realities of our contemporary civilisation and its communicative machinery that rolls on relentlessly.
Sense of Democracy
The centre for us is our sense of democracy: its freedom, its rights, its responsibilities, its virtues and blemishes.
Above all, its immense possibilities in living in dignity with others.
For most of the world’s almost eight billion people, these values are not even a century old.
Perhaps that is what we should be celebrating this Fiji Day remembering our own tragedies and triumphs.
COVID-19, in its many painful manifestations, offers opportunities: how to structure our health system; how to care for others; how to share the vaccines available; how to re-educate ourselves in the pursuit of good health and those little doses daily happiness.
And to become aware of our interconnected, interdependent world.
We can think about our diet and why we were told ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’.
To plant trees, not cut them :one tree at a time. They live longer than us.
Our citizenship
Perhaps for us in Fiji, the most important issue is our Citizenship, not the shallow halo of identity for this and that, race and religion.
Fiji has gone through the indelible traumas, random acts of violence and violations, caused by a couple of unnecessary coups of 1987.
Their after-effects continue to reverberate as waves in a lake after an earthquake.
It was shameful and shameless acts of cowardice that many will not forgive or forget.
But without forgiveness, who among us will escape a whipping? Without forgiveness, they say, there’s no future.
October 10, 1970
We as children knew 10 October as Fiji’s Cession Day.
In 1970, it merged into Fiji’s Independence Day.
In 1970, I was not in Fiji, so I missed the celebrations.Independence had come to us on a platter; well in a tanoa , you might say.
There was enormous goodwill in the country.
The Prime Minister of the Fiji Islands became a PM of an independent country without an election or struggle for independence.
People stood tall beside him in a small island country full of palm trees swaying like siblings.
Unique you might say: so was the Deed of Cession; so was the coming of Indian indentured migrants to these islands in the South Seas.
A community was uprooted from its ancient ways of life on a subcontinent, thousands of miles away, to protect the fragile indigenous structures of living which was being disrupted, indeed decimated, in many islands through brutal colonisation and ‘civilising missions’.
As well as in our two largest South Pacific neighbours where today many of our people; indigenous, settlers and migrants find shelter and create a life among refugees and asylum seekers from broken worlds.
Recent history
My own feeling is that because of our recent history, we should celebrate this regional identity and build bridges that are mutually respectful and open doors for future generations.
We are a Pacific people, waves in the same ocean.
For this we need to revalue our education system and make our history and our neighbours’ part of that understanding, growth and humane communication.
Many of our people travel to these places as sportsmen and women, workers, students, scholars and increasingly as South Pacific Islanders.
COVID-19, Climate change
This awareness of larger identification may become vital for the future: COVID-19 has been the cruel catalyst.
Climate change is a more existential enigma.
We should be totally involved in this life threatening, speciesextinction phenomenon whatever our other differences.
And influence the stubborn and shortsighted ideas of some of our neighbours.
National governments, regional institutions, organisations, the Commonwealth, the UN offer us some possibilities.
But the longest journey begins with the first step across the threshold of your home.
A brave schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, has shown us the way to raise world-consciousness toward this impending planetary tragedy.
Her story should be told, nay taught, to every child in every school on this Fiji Day.
All great tragedies happen from hidden sources: the earthquakes, volcanoes, drought, fires, tornadoes, famines, floods are mere symptoms of a much deeper disease.
There’s as yet no vaccine for this malaise except the vision of a people in unison.
Fiji’s Constitution
This year, to celebrate Fiji Day, I would read the Preamble of Fiji’s current Constitution as a prayer:
WE,THE PEOPLE OF FIJI, ...pages 1 and 2, at least.
You can compare this Preamble with those of the other comparable documents, we’ve had at least four.
If only we interpreted and taught the first two pages of the new Constitution, Fiji Day may acquire immense significance.
Civic education for democracy is essential for a composite political culture in the making.
These are some of the values we should be celebrating and sharing on Fiji Day.
The central concerns are for social cohesion and a political vision given expression in the constitution of a nation.
The rest is the circumference in which we live and dream, play and pray, hopefully together.
The problem with the scenes in a rear-view mirror is that you do see things flitting past or coming behind you, but too long a ‘lookback’ can make you miss the vistas in front, even cause an accident.
Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s leading writer. His volume of stories, Ashes and Waves, has just been published by Pacific Studies Press, Suva, Fiji. His forthcoming book, LIFE Journeys: Love and Grief, is due for publication shortly.