Methodist Church, Fiji Military and Fijian Politics 102

Why is the Bose ko Viti important to the lewe ni Lotu Waisele?
The importance placed on the Bose ko Viti (Annual Methodist Conference) is reflected in the extent of preparation, which Fijian Methodists regard as temporal and spiritual attitudes towards the Lotu.
The preparations being undertaken this year by the people of Burebasaga with the Marama Bale na Roko Tui Dreketi is the fitting example of her role as head of her Vanua and Matanitu. Her political affiliation and even being a Roman Catholic is secondary to her primary duty as a high chief and Fijian. For true to her ancestors’ wishes, the Lotu flourishes under the communal and chiefly system, it will languish in its absence.

The words of Rev Aminio Baledrokadroka – the renowned Methodist Missionary in 1894 in a letter from New Britain echoes through the ages:
“The People support the Lotu because they know its value in preventing wars and hatred to each other and cannibalism and heathenism and that it ensures peacefulness, as well as demonstrating to them the goodness and truth of the Lotu”.
It was in the development of the Bose ko Viti where money was raised ostensibly for foreign missions to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. More importantly the Bose ko Viti from 1838 provided the catalyst to Fijian aspirations for a church they could regard as their own that later determined the birth of Viti as a nation. Upon this foundation was built the seeds of cession to Great Britain and our regard for Western Civilization.

It was Rev Fredrick Langham who lived at Bau for the last twenty years of Cakobau’s life and who assumed the role of the high chief’s spiritual and political advisor that kept the pressure on Fiji’s first substantive Governor Sir Arthur Gordon to think native. (Dr. A.W Thornley Thesis ANU 1979). The link between the Methodist Church, the Fiji Military and Fijian tradition is extant to this day.

The Republic of Fiji Military Forces is a force originally set up in 1871 by the Ratu Cakobau’s native government to pacify warring and marauding mountain tribes against white settlers’ and Christian proseltysation. Wesleyan missionary the Rev Thomas Baker’s massacre in 1867 was Cakobau’s standing force’s raison ď ĕtre. The force after cession in 1874 was known as the Armed Native Constabulary and further engaged in the suppressing of the Kai Colo mountain tribes against the encroachment of colonialism and Christianity. The serrated sulu (skirt) worn and the lack of a head dress in the present day Fiji Army’s ceremonial dress are symbolic nationalist traditional links to its past. As observed by Reverend Wallace Deane “The masi was used as a turban, and so became the symbol of chieftainship. No ordinary man dare wear a masi-turban in the presence of a chief. The chiefs themselves wore it with studious dignity; they never, for instance, doffed it to anyone except to the representative of the British Crown”.1 Hence quite unique in Commonwealth forces military tradition and as a Fijian symbol of marked respect, Fiji Army soldiers on parade in their military ceremonial dress are less head dress. These vestiges of Fijian dress and tradition is Entrenched in the Fiji military that fosters its nationalistic patriotism and premise as the bastion of Fijian Paramountcy.

That the present Military backed illegal regime and others are hell bent on framing the Methodist Church as a political agent of instability shows ignorance of the highest order. In today’s Europe ethno-nationalism was the force that determined its national boundaries and has morphed with civic nationalism that has given rise to Western culture and liberal democracy .