Cakobau and the Ku Klux Klan
American South to administer an unyielding admonition to those so bold as to resist the logic of white supremacy, a similar need arose at precisely the same moment in the South Seas,” Henderson added.
In White Robes and Burning Crosses, Michael Newton noted US President Ulysses Grant was still campaigning for re-election when “the KKK first foreign chapter surfaced in faraway Fiji, an archipelago of some 332 islands located in Melanesia,
13000 miles northeast of NZ's North Island”.
Unlike the Americans, Fiji Klan's founders were Europeans.
For the whites in Levuka, then capital of Fiji, it seemed the perfect vehicle for opposition to King Cakobau, “a native Fijian who spurned the socalled benefits of white supremacy”.
No details survive of the Klan's operations in Fiji. Its leaders, apparently, were drawn from the right sort of European settlers-planters and businessman while its ranks were filled with the dregs of distant empires who had transformed Levuka into a frontier “hellhole”.
Cakobau tried to unite rival chiefs for mutual defence, but charges of corruption-plagued his government and violence spread from Levuka to the hinterlands.
"Britain had closed its consulate in Fiji five years earlier, but returned in 1874 “reluctantly”, its leaders claimed to bring order out of chaos,”Newton added.
“Sir Hercules Robinson arrived in September, signed a "Deed of Cession" with Cakobau on October 10, making Fiji a British colony, and then took office as interim governor. By the time his successor reached Fiji in June 1875, Robinson has suppressed the Klan in a true British style.”
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 19th-century Klan was originally organised as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866.
“The organisation quickly became a vehicle for Southern white underground resistance. Klan members sought the restoration of white supremacy through intimidation and violence aimed at the newly enfranchised black freedmen,” it noted
“Dressed in robes and sheets designed to frighten superstitious blacks and to prevent identification by the occupying federal troops, Klansmen whipped and killed freedmen and their white supporters in night-time raids.”
The literature, Top Cases of The FBI Vol II by R.J. Parker also noted how the Ku Klux Klan was "able to reach as far as Fiji in the 1870s.
“White settlers from foreign lands established a Klan to protect their interests, but when British colonials found out that they had plans to rebel against the crown, they eradicated its existence in Fiji, putting an end to the evil of the KKK in Fiji forever,” Parker said.
Quoting The Fiji Times, White Pacific author, Gerald Home said "one fine morning all Levuka was surprised to find the town in the hands of the Ku-Flux and made into a sort of barracks and an earthwork thrown up and a gun or two brandished.
“After this, the KKK grew and multiplied in secret and often at night put entries on across the beach.”
The KKK also operated in other parts of Fiji including Nadi and Nadroga.
According to Gravelle the KKK in Fiji was not as aggressive as the KKK in America. The Fiji society of the white supremacist group died out subtly as the British sided with Cakobau and with the help of native police crushed the Klans out of Ovalau forever.
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