When Fiji’s Acting Governor, Juxton Barton, addressed the Bose Levu Vakaturaga (Great Council of Chiefs) on 18 September 1936, he appealed to them to control alcohol abuse among indigenous Fijians.

Barton expressed his concern despite the existence of legislation that prohibited the majority of indigenous Fijians from having access to alcohol and of customary and religious strictures against alcohol consumption. It seems that Europeans imbibed and abused alcohol to a far greater extent than other ethnic groups in Fiji, but Barton’s speech points to the complex dynamics of alcohol and race.² Alcohol’s effect upon health was among the consequences that Barton listed. This chapter explores the entanglement of local and global flows of alcohol from Europe, the USA and other colonies to Fiji — not just the transfer of the commodity — but also the discourses and practices that were medicalised, moralised, racialised, gendered and politicised.³ At its most extreme, medical discourse focused in particular on ‘alcohol insanity’, while the clamour of moral, racial and gendered discourses became entangled with contesting calls over liberalisation versus prohibition of alcohol. These discourses were imbued with race, reflecting the assumptions about degeneracy, entitlement and civilisation that were directed at Fiji’s plural indigenous and immigrant communities. The intersections of race and imperialism and debates about alcohol and its relationship to mental and other illnesses in Fiji resonate with Simon Heap’s chapter on Nigeria in this book (see Chapter 5).

Fijians, along with other peoples in the Pacific Islands, had no alcoholic substances before their contact with outsiders.⁴ European voyages in the Pacific, led by the Spanish during the sixteenth century, may have been predated by visits from island Asia. As Mac Marshall and Leslie Marshall have suggested, it is possible that from such early interaction Pacific peoples learned how to make alcoholic beverages, including fermenting toddy from coconut palms to produce an intoxicating drink.⁵ By the nineteenth century, alcohol had become a powerful trading commodity and hence was widely known among indigenous communities. As European colonialism unfolded, varying responses and meanings were attached to alcohol by indigenous people and Europeans. Many indigenous Pacific Islanders consumed kava, a drink prepared from the kava root (piper methysticum). This substance is not alcoholic but is sedative, and was used for centuries for ceremonial, social and spiritual purposes (as depicted in Figure 4.2). In Fiji kava is known as yaqona.⁶ Not surprisingly, in some Pacific societies alcohol was initially referred to as ‘White man’s kava’,⁷ and in Fiji as yaqona ni valagi (referring to the English) or yaqona ni kaivalagi (referring to someone from outside Fiji, usually European).⁸ Mateni, a Fijian term now used for being drunk on alcohol, once applied only to yaqona.⁹ The connection made between kava and alcohol was not just one of terminology. Alcohol and kava were sometimes mixed together. They also became associated in legal, moralistic, racial, gendered and medical debates. Fijians called alcohol ‘white man’s kava’, while some white men condemned kava along with other substances. For example, in 1862 Reverend Joseph Waterhouse’s doctrine on teetotalism for Wesleyans in Fiji included kava, described as the ‘opium’ of Fiji. He was unsuccessful: ‘In addition to ardent spirits the yaqona or kava root, is the curse of Fiji. For 12 years I have preached moderation, but in vain. With the Fijian of the present day it is all or none, – stupefaction, or sense.’¹⁰ In 1871, after the Wesleyans’ Fiji District Meeting, a ban on intoxicating liquor (except for medicinal and sacramental purposes) was introduced.¹¹ The alcohol ban appears to have been unpopular and was flouted. The number of expulsions from the church for intoxication equalled those for all other causes, and church membership in Fiji’s eastern circuit declined from 3,598 to 2,808 in 1874. In some parts of Fiji, notably Rotuma, the missionary ban on intoxicating substances extended to kava. This restriction lasted only until 1873.

Figure 4.1 Map of the South Pacific

Figure 4.2 Postcard of ‘Kava making Fiji’, early 1900s

Barton’s speech was directed at the Great Council of Chiefs, ostensibly representative of iTaukei (indigenous Fijians). However, colonial Fiji was ethnically complex. The 1936 census showed that Indo-Fijians made up 43 per cent of Fiji’s population.¹² The roots of this community lay with the girmitiyas, indentured labourers who were shipped from India between 1879 and 1920 to work in Fiji, mainly for Europeans, in the sugar and copra industries.¹³ Between 1865 and 1911, indentured labourers also originated from the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), Tokelau, New Guinea, and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (Kiribati and Tuvalu). Only a small proportion of Indians in Fiji were ‘free’ immigrants from Gujarat and Punjab. Other communities in Fiji included small numbers of migrants from China and other Pacific Islands.

Europeans were at the apex of the colonial hierarchy. They were also multi-ethnic in origin, being drawn from various regions in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Europe. Some were born in Fiji, and represented diverse classes and interest groups such as planters, traders, missionaries, artisans and public servants. But in effect, ‘European’ was a racial category that equated to whiteness and white privilege and power. There were also the descendants of European men and indigenous Fijians and other Pacific Islanders – variously known throughout Fiji’s history as part-Europeans, part-Fijians, half-castes and mixed-race – and, by the late twentieth century, more commonly as Kailoma.¹⁴ Unlike non-Europeans, many Kailoma were granted access to alcohol. This potent beverage was a powerful marker of racialised and gendered boundaries; the regulations to enforce these were also part of the extension of control and order within a changing colonial society.

Regulation and race

By the late nineteenth century, almost all colonies within the Pacific Islands and the British white settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada had regulated indigenous and much of non-European access to alcohol, on the basis of common assumptions about race, civilisation and alcohol.¹⁵ Although alcoholism and drunkenness were considered to be negative consequences of white people’s advanced civilisation, and indicative of moral failing and degeneracy, drinking was also seen as an entitlement of race. Throughout the Pacific indigenous people were prohibited from buying and consuming alcohol. Fiji’s policy was influenced by the negative impact alcohol was seen to have had on indigenous peoples in New Zealand and Australia. Its restrictive legislation was in large part derived from New South Wales legislation, which had banned alcohol for indigenous Australians. A few years after Fiji’s cession to Britain in 1874, legislation was introduced that made it an offence to supply intoxicating liquor to natives or Polynesian immigrants. ‘Native’ did not just equate to indigenous Fijians but, as defined in the 1911 Liquor Ordinance, included Indians if they were indigenous Pacific Islanders or members of ‘an aboriginal race of India’.¹⁶ Those with a parent or grandparent indigenous to the Pacific or India were also considered to be natives. However, Pacific and Indian men who could trace European ancestry through their fathers’ descent were entitled to possess and drink alcohol.¹⁷ Heavy fines could be imposed on those who supplied alcohol to ‘natives’, while the latter could be fined up to £5 or imprisoned for up to one month if possessing or drinking liquor. This policy, which was in place until the 1950s, reinforced assumed connections between race, crime and alcohol. Court records in 1924 revealed a ‘continual stream of offenders, mainly natives and Indians’.¹⁸ ‘Natives’ caught with almost any quantity of alcohol could be prosecuted and criminalised. There were three exceptions, the first of which was the consumption of hop beer in native saloons. Legislation in 1917 formalised the licensing of saloons that could sell hop beer containing under 2 per cent proof spirit.¹⁹ Fijians and Indians may have learned how to manufacture hop beer when they worked in European households or through socialising and working with Kailoma.²⁰ Further legislation in 1928 tightened the manufacturing and licensing of places that could sell hop beer, but this failed to control the illegal brewing of beer over 11 per cent proof.²¹ In the hop beer saloons established throughout Fiji, ‘the potency of the liquid sold and its harmful effects were legend’.²²

Second, an elite minority of ‘natives’ – ‘men of rank, who can be trusted with a permit’ – were exempted from the 1911 liquor restrictions.²³ Non-indentured Indians of good character who had resided in Fiji for more than a year could apply for restricted permits, but policy stipulated that full permits were to be issued only to Indians in exceptional circumstances. Colonial officials were directed to use their discretion when issuing full or restricted liquor permits to ‘half caste natives’ of European descent. The most common (and less prestigious) liquor permits allowed holders to drink beer at hotel bars; a smaller number of holders could consume spirits, and a very restricted minority were permitted to purchase bottled liquor. Chinese, like Europeans, were not prohibited from access to liquor, ostensibly because they were ‘reputed to have little tendency to become intoxicated having strong heads for liquor’.²⁴ Concern that Chinese storekeepers allegedly supplied liquor to prohibited persons led to Chinese, but not Japanese, being classified as ‘natives’ and requiring a liquor permit under the 1929 Liquor Ordinance. The Chinese government and consulate in Australia strongly objected to this amendment and the regulation was soon lifted.²⁵

Medical reasons were the third exception to the 1911 Liquor Ordinance – but as will be expanded on later in this chapter, this was an area of considerable ambiguity. A doctor could prescribe quantities of alcohol to a patient of any ethnicity. This became a loophole through which some alcoholics obtained liquor. At the same time the ordinance enabled anyone, including Europeans, of ‘confirmed intemperate habit’ to be prohibited from consuming alcohol. This order was publicly posted and presumably referred to those who were considered alcoholics or of persistent danger to themselves or others.

The gendered boundaries of access to alcohol were far less complicated than those pertaining to race or status. Although some indigenous women had high status, generally men’s authority was dominant in the domestic and public spheres. The colonial state and Christian churches reinforced traditional gender hierarchies and constraints on women’s activities.²⁶ Until 1969, all non-European women were prohibited from purchasing alcohol. However, from 1962 European women were allowed to obtain alcohol permits. In the early twentieth century, even the serving of alcohol and kava by women had provoked an outcry. During the nineteenth century several European barmaids had worked in the boisterous hotels in Fiji’s first capital, Levuka, but by 1933 there were only three barmaids in Fiji.²⁷ Similarly, the operation of kava saloons by Fijian women led to moral concerns during the late 1920s and 1930s, with claims that such ‘dens’ were also meeting places for sexual assignations and prostitution.²⁸ However, some colonial officials suggested that women had a moderating influence on men’s behaviour in the saloons.²⁹ Women’s access to alcohol was one of the most contentious issues when the 1911 ordinance was replaced by the Liquor Ordinance of 1962. By then, the race issue had become less prominent, with all men in Fiji aged over eighteen years allowed to buy and drink liquor.³⁰

Transferring temperance and prohibition

The introduction and subsequent gradual lifting of liquor restrictions spanned the whole period of British colonial rule in Fiji, from 1874 to 1970. During the nineteenth century, most indigenous Fijians embraced Christianity, abandoning, or being forced to reject, their prior ‘polytheistic cosmology.’³¹ Some pockets of pre-Christian indigenous Fijian spiritual beliefs persisted, although many of the practices associated with these beliefs were outlawed.³² Colonial Fiji was a strongly religious society, embracing Christian, Hindu and Islamic faiths. All of these religions taught abstention from or moderation of alcohol consumption. International discourses on liquor prohibition and temperance, especially those prevalent in the USA, New Zealand and Australia, resonated also in Fiji, where sharply contesting views over alcohol consumption and legislation developed. The resulting debates became entangled with ideas on racial difference prevalent at the time.

Ideas on temperance and prohibition flowed into Fiji through transcolonial church links and temperance movements during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. When HMS Pearl docked in Fiji during 1874 – the year Fiji was declared a British colony – those on board included members of the International Order of Good Templars. Three lodges were eventually established, and during the 1880s the lodge in Suva housed the Freemasons’ Lodge of Fiji. The Fiji Templars were part of the Grand Lodge of New South Wales and Fiji, with Reverend Arthur Small of the Methodist Mission and G.A.F.W. Beauclerc (the Deputy Grand Chief Templar) as property trustees.³³ Earlier visitors to Fiji had included George Grant, a temperance evangelist from New Zealand, in 1896.³⁴ During the heyday of prohibition in the USA, advocates toured the Pacific Islands. For example, Reverend J. Dawson of the World’s League Against Alcoholism visited Fiji and Samoa in 1924.³⁵ Soon after, in 1925, the Fiji League Against Alcoholism was founded, and it was succeeded by the Fiji Social Service Alliance in 1931. The league and allied bodies ardently lobbied government against any potential liberalisation of Fiji’s liquor policy.

In 1927 the league tried to publish temperance propaganda in the official Fijian vernacular newspaper Na Mata. However, the Secretary of Native Affairs objected to the transfer of foreign prohibition discourse to Fiji. The intended material told a story from South Africa: ‘Khama: The Chief Who Worked Wonders’.³⁶ The Secretary of Native Affairs argued that the story was not applicable to Fijian culture and objected to the view that prohibition should embrace all classes.³⁷ Officials at the time wished to retain the privilege of access to alcohol for elite Fijians.

Nevertheless, international visitors set on pushing the prohibition message continued to arrive. Foreign Christian missionaries warned of the evils of alcohol when they proselytised Indo-Fijians. In 1924, for example, Reverend A.W. McMillan was sent from New Zealand as Field Secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association. He was a founder of the Indian Reform League and secretary of the Indian League Against Alcoholism, which was concerned about the effect of alcohol on the Indian community.³⁸

In a similar vein, Reverend Frank Lade, President of the Methodist Church of Australia, applauded the successes of prohibition in the USA when he addressed a meeting at Suva’s town hall in 1931.³⁹ International prohibition propaganda flowed freely into Fiji and drew upon examples from the USA and other colonies such as South Africa, India and those in the Pacific.⁴⁰ In 1962 the Pacific Christian Literature Society and the Stanmore Missionary Press in Sydney published tracts on ‘Danger in the Pacific’, warning that ‘Strong Drink will spoil you’ and lead to fighting, swearing, competition, stealing, bad debts, murder, cursing, evil thoughts, sickness and arguments.⁴¹

The prohibition lobby in Fiji used its strongest argument against alcohol by invoking racial considerations, especially when government sought to amend the 1911 Liquor Ordinance. The Methodist missionary and President of the Fiji Social Service Alliance, G.H. Findlay, argued in 1932 that Fiji’s liquor laws did not work well in a ‘mixed community’, because they aggravated issues of race.⁴² This had ‘the additional bad effect of making the native think of liquor as a privilege of the superior races, which, in certain circumstances, he might obtain’.⁴³ An impressive line-up of groups that advocated prohibition presented a petition to Fiji’s Governor and the Secretary of State for the Colonies in early 1932. These bodies included the Fiji Social Service Alliance, the Methodist Mission, St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, the London Missionary Society in Fiji, the Fiji Mission of Seventh Day Adventists, the European and Indian branches of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Young Fijian Society, the Indian Reform League, the Arya Samaj, the Sikh Gurdwara Committee and the Fiji Muslim League.⁴⁴ This multifaceted coalition was united by the common purpose of abstinence from alcohol, but it also reflected emergent politicised criticism of racial discrimination in Fiji, especially among Indo-Fijians. As the Fiji Social Service Alliance put it in its recommendations to the select committee on the amendment of the liquor ordinance:

A poison to the ‘native race’

The speech of the Acting Governor, Juxton Barton, to the Great Council of Chiefs in 1936 reflected the operation of indirect rule – the alliance between Europeans and the chiefly elite – in maintaining the colonial state in Fiji. This alliance was based upon the doctrine of the paramountcy of Fijian interests and its dependence upon the British Crown’s protection.⁴⁶ Charles Turner, Secretary of the Fiji Social Service Alliance, linked the government’s ‘duty of trusteeship towards native races for their training and education to a higher moral and education level’ with the liquor question.⁴⁷ Government’s duty towards indigenous Fijians was expected to prevail over the interests of a small minority entitled to liquor who had financial interests in the liquor business. The small minority included the Fijian elite, who were accorded special privileges, including access to alcohol. The state expected chiefs to enforce prohibition in villages even when these chiefs were allowed to consume the very substance that was banned. Although many, though not all, chiefs were teetotal for religious and cultural reasons, Barton disapproved of alcohol consumption among Fijian chiefs, just as missionaries had during the nineteenth century. In 1870 the Levuka missionary Joseph Nettleton observed an ‘increase in drunkenness’ and chiefs ‘boldly’ imbibing their ‘drams’.⁴⁸ The Wesleyan missionary Frederick Langham expelled several church members on the island of Bau because of their alcohol consumption. ‘The rage for English liquors both among members and nonmembers, chiefs and people is something appalling.’⁴⁹ The paramount chief Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau was reprimanded by Langham for his drinking habits. During the 1880s, annual gatherings of the Great Council of Chiefs were described by European observers as ‘a saturnalia of drunken debauchery, riotous extravagance, and rampant, profligacy’.⁵⁰ Ratu Rabici’s alcohol consumption was so persistent that in 1878 he was suspended from his post of Roko Tui Rewa and banned from visiting Suva for a year in 1891. He was also forced to retire from his official post.⁵¹ During the early twentieth century, an outspoken temperance campaigner, Beauclerc, demanded that chiefs – many whom he called ‘drunken sots’ – be denied alcohol permits. That privilege had:

The plummeting population of indigenous Fijians was also given as a reason for prohibiting indigenous access to alcohol. In 1907 Reverend F. Stubbs attributed falling Fijian population numbers to the ‘evil’ illegal supply of liquor to Fijians.⁵³ The decline in population (and also the ‘sickly children’ Barton had mentioned) had a longer history and was associated with introduced and infectious diseases, such as measles, influenza and dysentery, rather than the impact of alcohol.⁵⁴

Beauclerc’s comments and European preconceptions that alcohol abased the most intelligent class in the colony seemed to be confirmed twenty-four years later with the tragic circumstances surrounding the death in 1935 of the Fijian native medical practitioner Mesulame Taveta.⁵⁵ He had been posted to the British and French Condominium of the New Hebrides, where he was treated with disdain by the French doctors and the British administrators. Taveta began drinking heavily and, although forbidden to consume alcohol, continued to binge-drink. He contracted malaria and blackwater fever but was refused admission to the nearest hospital because the doctor misdiagnosed this, assuming that his delirium was due to drunkenness. Taveta died soon after, not from alcohol poisoning, but because of European medical preconceptions about alcohol and indigenous Pacific Islanders. His former tutor Dr Thomas Clunie had asserted in 1932 that ‘few natives lifted out of their natural sphere escape death from alcoholic poisoning’.⁵⁶ Dr Sylvester Lambert, the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division’s Pacific representative in 1934, also stated that alcohol had a toxic effect on Pacific Islanders, as they supposedly lacked Europeans’ ‘acquired immunity’.⁵⁷ Or as Barton had put it: liquor was a poison to the ‘native race’.

One reason why liquor could be so toxic was that much of what was consumed was unregulated, illicitly brewed or distilled, with dubious additives to increase potency and keep costs down. Restrictive policies and high import duties encouraged illicit brewing but also inflated the price of commercially manufactured alcohol. During the 1920s regular supplies of whisky flowed into the rural districts and sold at sixteen shillings a bottle:⁵⁸ hardly affordable for the majority of indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians who had a subsistence or small farming livelihood, or for unskilled wage-earners, who earned around two shillings a day.⁵⁹ Illegal alcohol included home brew usually made of hops, sugar and yeast, and spirits distilled from ingredients such as molasses, rice, pineapple or raisins (often known as ‘Raisin Jack’).⁶⁰ Methylated spirits (‘metho’) was among the toxic concoctions that was sometimes added, and was sometimes even mixed with yaqona, a practice reputably favoured by southern Indians in Fiji. American servicemen stationed in Fiji during World War II taught Fijians how to make ‘Black Jack’, an alcoholic drink containing boot polish.⁶¹ In 1957 an article in the Pacific Islands Monthly reported that ‘Kava, laced with ‘metho’ and ‘Black Jack’, provide cheap horrible concoctions, but [are] well in the reach of the average Fijian who wants to become ‘blind’ drunk.’⁶² Other names for home brews used in the 1940s included tevoro (devil), siviyara (plough), kaukamea (iron) and Fiji Airways.⁶³ Police raids in Macuata Province in 1940 seized liquor distilled by Indo-Fijians that, when tested, was shown to have proof spirit levels ranging from 25 to 109 per cent.⁶⁴ By the 1960s some Fijians in the Nakelo, Bau, Rewa and Noco tikinas (districts) became intoxicated by soaking a cloth in methylated spirits, tying it to their wrist and then inhaling alternate breaths of meths and cigarette smoke.⁶⁵

While its effects were not usually as enduring as the ‘alcoholic insanity’ that pushed a very small number of drinkers into Fiji’s Public Mental Asylum, alcohol, especially illicit brews, could lead to temporary mental problems. In 1948 Kailoma and Fijians brewed a concoction mixture of hops, brasso, vanilla, raisins and ‘coconut spey’ on the island of Taveuni.⁶⁶ The District Officer claimed that ‘two glasses are enough to put the drinker into a raving condition’.⁶⁷ Police reported Gilbert and Ellice Islanders in Fiji becoming ‘fighting drunk’ through drinking fermented toddy.⁶⁸ Fermented toddy apparently could sometimes drive the drinker ‘almost crazy’.⁶⁹ In 1938 the Macuata District Commissioner R.N. Caldwell reported that a Fijian had run ‘amok’, burning an Indian’s house and threatening other Indians with an axe, while under the influence of an ‘Indian made spirit’.⁷⁰ Even hop beer, when brewed to a high level of potency, was said to make ‘natives’ drunk and, ‘in many cases, very violently ill’. In 1924 an employer thought that one of his Indian staff would die, while one of his Fijian workers ‘was silly for days’.⁷¹

Racial stereotypes about the impact of alcohol on non-Europeans were common in Fiji and were used to justify restrictions and prohibition. Even when alcohol was legally available to non-Europeans, Europeans perpetuated the stereotype: ‘It is well known that the Fijian “just cannot hold his liquor” … the most amiable of South Sea Islanders – except, when, “under the influence”, he becomes a quarrelsome pest.’⁷² One medical doctor observed that alcohol ‘made the usually gentle, polite’ Taveta ‘aggressive and insubordinate’.⁷³ Prohibitionists in Fiji, such as McMillan, also cited international temperance literature to prove that there were ‘points of resemblance’ with conditions in South Africa and in Fiji, concluding that ‘Natives can’t be moderate drinkers.’⁷⁴ When Reverend Anare Raiwalui declared in 1962 that ‘Liquor is public enemy no. 1’, he noted that he knew of ‘Fijians whose careers had been marred by the influences of liquor’.⁷⁵

‘Liquor Drives Fijians Mad’

This eye-catching headline from the popular regional journal Pacific Islands Monthly fed into racial stereotypes about indigenous Fijians and alcohol.⁷⁶ The media also reflected colloquial discourse, whereby ‘madness’ referred to a temporary state or behaviour that was bizarre or contrary to racialised preconceptions. The journal editor Robert Robson, reporting on Fijian troops stationed in Malaya during the 1955 emergency, said that liquor ‘maddens’ Fijians: ‘Very wisely, the officers keep their Fijians away from all alcohol’, as it ‘destroys their great good-humour and invariable courtesy’.⁷⁷

Barton did warn the Fijian chiefs that alcohol could cause insanity. Popular and medical discourse stating that alcohol was an important cause of insanity was transferred to the Pacific from Europe, Australasia and the USA. In 1915 a Samoan newspaper cited an article from the American Everybody’s Magazine: ‘it is a universally accepted belief that alcohol is an important factor in producing insanity’.⁷⁸ Alcoholic insanity was also a recognised diagnosis within mental asylums,⁷⁹ including the Public Lunatic Asylum in Suva.⁸⁰ Alcoholic insanity and alcoholism have been ambiguously located in Western psychiatry. They were considered both causative and symptomatic of moral failing. According to degeneration theory, which was favoured by many Western doctors during the late nineteenth century, ‘racial weakening’ could be accounted for by behaviours such as alcohol consumption and masturbation.⁸¹ It was believed that such weakening could lead to hereditary mental illness, linked to physical and intellectual disabilities. This is possibly why Barton warned the Great Council of Chiefs that the abuse of alcohol brought sickly children into the world.⁸²

Yet doctors’ notes from Fiji’s asylum were generally devoid of moral judgement about alcohol and tended to describe alcoholism as an organic condition that had disturbing consequences for the patients and their families. The asylum record of what became St Giles Psychiatric Hospital in the 1960s show that alcohol abuse between 1884 and 1964 was never as prominent in the aetiology and nosology of mental disorders as it was in other regions under British control, such as colonial New Zealand and Australia.⁸³ Alcoholic insanity was also often confused with general paralysis of the insane (GPI) because of similar symptoms of mental restlessness, confusion, facial and bodily tremors and grandiose delusions.⁸⁴ This connection was problematic in Fiji, where the majority of patients diagnosed with general paralysis of the insane were indigenous Fijians who showed no evidence of alcohol abuse.⁸⁵

Asylum records in Fiji also belie media and popular discourse that highlighted any links between indigenous Fijians, liquor and certifiable insanity. Governor Sir John Thurston noted that Ratu Alifereti Ravulo was sent to the lunatic asylum following alcohol abuse during what was referred to by him as the ‘X’mas orgies’ of 1888,⁸⁶ but there is no record of Ravulo’s admission.⁸⁷ Between the asylum’s opening in 1884 and 1964, only two indigenous Fijians were admitted to St Giles with alcohol given as a cause of their illness. One, a young native medical practitioner, was reported in 1946 to have drunk methylated spirits. He was disciplined but then became acutely depressed and refused to work. He was re-diagnosed with manic depression and never practised medicine again.⁸⁸ The other, a fifty-five-year-old Fijian foreman, was diagnosed with senile dementia in 1953. His condition was said to have been caused by financial worry and alcohol. He died in St Giles in 1961.⁸⁹

Just one Indo-Fijian was diagnosed with alcoholism (along with violent mania and melancholia) and admitted to the asylum before World War II.⁹⁰ This gradually changed after the war when more Indo-Fijians were admitted. Like indigenous Fijians, the majority of Indo-Fijians were not entitled to buy alcohol. Many chose to abstain from consuming liquor, for cultural, religious and economic reasons. But kava was legal and enthusiastically imbibed by many Indo-Fijians. Kava did not induce insanity, although a male Indo-Fijian mental hospital patient with manic depression was labelled a ‘yagona addict’ in 1953, while another, with schizophrenia, was described as a heavy yaqona user.⁹¹

Women rarely drank kava, so it is surprising that it was reported in 1888 that villager Mele’s excessive yaqona drinking made her abstain from eating, causing her to succumb to insanity.⁹² Another female patient, diagnosed with manic depression, was said to have drunk yaqona ‘all day’.⁹³ Only two European and one Chinese woman had alcohol listed as a cause for their condition on admission to St Giles during the colonial era, in 1956, 1959 and 1937 respectively. More female patients, especially Europeans and Kailoma, bore and suffered from the impact of their husbands’ alcohol abuse. In 1948 Molly, a Kailoma, was in despair about her European husband, who was a ‘compulsory alcoholic’. This was echoed in other accounts of the social and mental effects of alcohol within families in Fiji.⁹⁴

There is however evidence that alcohol abuse among Europeans was more widespread outside the confines of medical institutions. Drunkenness in Pacific port towns, such as Levuka, was legendary during the nineteenth century,⁹⁵ and alcohol dependence seems to have been common among planters and early colonial administrators.⁹⁶ Reports of ‘heavy drinking’ and the large consumption of spirits by Europeans in Fiji persisted in later decades.⁹⁷ The alcohol problem in Fiji was a problem for the very race that was entitled to drink (for instance at Navua Hotel, depicted in Figure 4.3). Those admitted to the asylum for ‘alcoholic insanity’ before World War II were almost exclusively male Europeans. This ethnic predominance, however, did not reflect the asylum’s overall ethnic makeup. Europeans never formed more than 15 per cent of patients and, after 1914, around 5 per cent. Europeans also comprised only 2.57 per cent of Fiji’s population in 1911. From around 1905, Indo-Fijians made up the highest percentage of admissions, with Fijians never constituting more than 40 per cent of admissions until the 1970s.⁹⁸ In 1901 Indians made up 14 per cent and Fijians 79 per cent of Fiji’s population; these respective percentages changed to 50.5 and 43 by 1966.

Figure 4.3 Postcard of Navua Hotel, Fiji Islands, 1900–1920

Michael, a European civil servant, was diagnosed as an ‘alcoholic maniac’ in 1910.⁹⁹ He had attempted suicide by drinking potentially lethal perchloride of mercury, and during his transfer to the asylum he had tried to jump off a cliff. Michael spent four months in the asylum, where he was under constant supervision and sometimes confined to a straitjacket. He was delusional, violent, anorexic and manic. He heard voices that directed him to commit murder, and he believed that his presence on earth damned a million people a day. Michael’s severe depression resurfaced, and there were further suicide attempts. Michael saw his madness as a moral struggle between God and the devil. The devil won through driving him to drink, and also to chronic masturbation. Probably because of this moral failing, he urged the medical superintendent to cut out or open his genitalia, presumably to stop him masturbating.

Michael regarded alcohol as the source of his moral failing, although the causes of his severe mental condition were likely to have been more complex. Alcohol abuse often coexisted with other mental conditions, and doctors sometimes prioritised alcohol as a cause of a patient’s illness. Conversely, the role of alcohol consumption within the aetiology of mental disorders could be underestimated because patients might hide the true extent of their alcohol consumption patterns and abuse – especially within cultures where the consumption of liquor was considered immoral, shameful or illegal. Mani, an Indian storekeeper, had six admissions between 1934 and 1962.¹⁰⁰ He was initially diagnosed with dementia, then with mania, and only on his fourth admission was his disorder listed as ‘alcoholic psychosis’. The debilitating impact of alcohol abuse on physical and mental health is also often cumulative and may be evident only after several years of alcohol addiction. Some of the patients admitted with alcohol-related conditions were also very ill physically. In 1902 a European patient admitted with ‘alcoholic insanity’ died from thrombosis in the brain, dementia and exhaustion, all thought to have been directly related to his alcohol abuse.¹⁰¹ He had been a baker and continued to believe he was still baking loaves every morning during his time in the asylum. He was also convinced that people were trying to cut off his head.

The asylum was sometimes a space to ‘dry out’ the alcoholic fever and madness that gripped some travellers and crew, either on board ships or within Pacific ports. Alcohol abuse was a problem for workers on Pacific steamships and was partly exacerbated by working conditions, boredom and depression.¹⁰² A European fireman on the SS Atua was admitted with ‘alcoholic insanity’ in 1911 for two days after throwing himself overboard and trying to assault officers and crew.¹⁰³ The sudden cessation of alcohol could have lethal consequences for alcoholics. In 1907 a European veterinarian, ‘temporarily depressed in mind’, sailed from New Zealand to Fiji on the Moura.¹⁰⁴ After he was denied alcohol, he went into delirium tremens. He was refused urgent medical treatment at Suva’s main hospital and instead sent to the asylum, where he soon died. Thomas, a former sailor from Ireland who had settled in Noumea in New Caledonia, was diagnosed with alcoholic insanity and spent eight years in Suva’s asylum.¹⁰⁵ His mental condition had deteriorated after his wife’s death, and in 1882 he stowed away in the coal bunkers of the PS Thistle. He was discovered when the ship docked in Fiji and was declared insane. Thomas was initially placed under restraint in a police cell and then drifted into prison as a vagrant, remaining until he was committed to the asylum after it was founded in 1884. On his discharge, the medical superintendent predicted that Thomas would slide back into alcoholism in Suva. He was shipped back to Noumea, considered ‘a more civilised & larger port’, on the condition that he was not given any liquor during the voyage.

Small amounts of alcohol were administered to patients of all ethnicities within the mental asylum. Under section 77 of the 1911 Liquor Ordinance, registered medical practitioners could prescribe liquor. Within the asylum, whisky was sometimes given as a stimulant, or combined with milk and egg and passed through a nose-tube for patients who, like Michael, had ‘wasted away’ or refused food or drink.¹⁰⁶ On 13 January 1907, for example, a long-term female European patient who became very weak and vomited frequently was given a special daily diet of three ounces of whisky, one pint of beef tea, two pints of milk, bread and butter, tea and rice pudding. It is unclear whether alcohol was given in small doses to hospitalised alcoholics, but samples of the permits issued outside the asylum suggest that some doctors enabled a steady supply of alcohol to be given to patients who probably suffered from alcohol dependency. For example, one medical doctor, Dr Miller, wrote in 1916 that ‘a patient of mine is suffering from a chronic disease and is in need of a bottle of good whisky per fortnight’.¹⁰⁷ There is no record of what this illness was. Until 1918, prescriptions could be issued for one bottle of spirits per week, fortnight or month, for a duration of six months, and then renewed.

After 1918 doctors could only supply a medical certificate for procurement of a liquor permit, which the patient (unless bed-ridden or hospitalised) used to apply for a permit through the district commissioner and the inspector general of constabulary.¹⁰⁸ For example, during the 1920s and 1930s, Prasad consulted doctors several times for acute alcoholism.¹⁰⁹ For many years he had been able to obtain a liquor permit on medical grounds, but eventually the District Medical Officer of Lautoka, Dr Philip Harper, persuaded Prasad to surrender the certificate. Several years later Prasad persuaded Dr F. Roth Carrick to recommend a dose of one bottle of beer a day, but clearly Prasad obtained more liquor through other means, as he nearly killed himself through drink on several occasions. In 1935 Carrick managed to get Prasad to again hand in his liquor permit when he suffered ‘a fit of remorse and a bad headache’. Harper had often seen Prasad and his son drunk and advised against issuing further permits.¹¹⁰

Reasons given in applications for liquor permits on medical grounds included rheumatism, debility, chronic cough and bronchitis. The Nadroga District Medical Officer recommended that an Indo-Fijian patient be allowed one bottle of spirits per month because he needed stimulants: ‘I can think of no stimulant to compare with the judicious exhibitive of alcohol.’¹¹¹ An Indo-Fijian storekeeper on Taveuni was able to obtain a liquor permit to purchase four bottles of whisky and eight bottles of beer per month because his doctor said that liquor was of great value to him during his frequent attacks of waqaqa (infection and fever from filariasis).¹¹² This was contrary to the Governor’s view in 1934 that there was no value in alcohol for treating medical conditions: ‘There are medicines which in practically every case are quite as efficacious as alcohol, and Fijians and Indians who can afford alcohol can afford to buy medicines.’¹¹³ The Governor ruled that henceforth no liquor permits were to be issued on medical grounds except on a recommendation by the Chief Medical Officer to the Colonial Secretary.

Change of brewing in the colony

The patterns of reported alcohol abuse changed after World War II, when Indo-Fijians rather than Europeans were noted in St Giles’ records with alcohol-related mental disorders. One reason for this was that more Indo-Fijians, and more people in all other ethnic communities, now had access to alcohol – both illicitly and legally. The war had been a catalyst in the growth of the informal liquor industry, from which some Indo-Fijians profited, as well as allowing easier access to alcohol. The total number of liquor permit holders increased from 7,542 in 1947 to 20,088 in 1953.¹¹⁴ Of these, 14,815 were Indians, and 5,473 were Fijians and others.¹¹⁵ More liberal attitudes among Indo-Fijian communities towards the consumption of alcohol also changed after World War II, but many Hindus and Muslims, as well as iTaukei, were still teetotal. The class structure of Indo-Fijian communities was also shifting, with a growing middle class enjoying a slightly higher disposable income. The majority of Indo-Fijians admitted with alcoholism to St Giles before the 1960s were storekeepers (seven, and also one Chinese storekeeper), who probably stocked liquor. Contrary to stereotypes in Western countries of the homeless as alcoholics, none of the destitute or homeless people admitted to St Giles during the colonial period appear to have had serious alcohol problems.

Outside the mental hospital, both the pro- and anti-liquor lobbies remained vocal, but in Fiji medical reasons were never prominent in demands to further restrict access to alcohol. Instead the race issue came to the fore as the liquor question became politicised. By the late 1940s, political divisions over prohibition were sharply drawn between Indian politicians – notably the Arya Samaj leader Vishnu Deo and A.D. Patel.¹¹⁶ Deo advocated total prohibition while Patel considered that restrictions on alcohol should be lifted for all ethnic communities. Patel’s stance was supported by most of the Indian advisory committees to government. It was argued that prohibition in fact promoted the manufacture and consumption of illicit liquor and methylated spirits. Both Patel and Deo saw the liquor laws as racially discriminatory: alcohol was a signifier and concrete expression of racialised lines in Fiji. Patel saw the permit system as paternalistic. Deo’s and the Samajists’ views were informed by the situation in India, where teetotalism was a key symbol of nationalism and anti-colonialism.¹¹⁷

Alcohol remained an important ingredient within the state’s paternalistic protection of indigenous Fijians.¹¹⁸ In 1947 the government proposed lifting liquor restrictions for Indo-Fijians but keeping those for indigenous Fijians, thus ‘establishing racial equality while protecting the Fijians’.¹¹⁹ This proposal was strongly opposed by most Fijian and European members of the Legislative Council, and the ensuing select committee failed to reach a decision.¹²⁰ It was commerce and industry, not patronising racial considerations, that brought a considerable change to Fiji’s liquor laws and the legal availability of alcohol in 1958. In the same year as Carlton Brewery began brewing Fiji Bitter, restrictions on the consumption of beer in licensed bars were lifted for all males aged over eighteen. However, the prohibitionists did not give up. In 1962, when government proposed removing the permits required by Fijians to purchase spirits, and the restrictions on women’s access to alcohol,¹²¹ Reverend Doug Fullerton of the Methodist church claimed that he had support from many Fijians in villages for the view that everyone, including Europeans, should have to apply for a permit if they wanted to drink.¹²²

Debates about alcohol became again entangled with issues of race during the 1960s amid talks about universal franchise and Fiji’s impending independence from Britain. Fullerton, Europeans and many Fijians argued that Fijians needed more time to learn how to make responsible decisions about drinking and the alcohol legislation¹²³ – a well-established paternalistic and protectionist stance, which was also echoed in views about franchise and political independence. Furthermore, one section of Fijian society remained deprived of equal rights in terms of suffrage and access to alcohol: Indian women. According to the official report of the liquor committee in 1962, almost everyone in Fiji agreed that Indian women should not consume alcohol.¹²⁴ Restrictions on the buying and drinking of liquor by Indian women were not lifted until 1969 – the same year they attained the right to vote, and one year before Fiji’s independence from Britain. Even then, women (excepting barmaids) were prohibited from entering public bars for several more years.

Conclusion

It has been argued in this chapter that the global flow of alcohol and alcohol discourse across cultures was embedded in assumptions of race and gender. Conceptions of alcoholic insanity were transferred from Europe, North America and British colonies to become entangled with Fiji’s plural cultures. As the historian Brij Lal states: ‘Maintaining strict separation of the races was an essential component of the colonisers’ desire to control the colonised … colonial rule was premised on the ideology of inequality.’¹²⁵ The power dynamics between coloniser and colonised are integral to understanding past patterns of access to and consumption of alcohol in Fiji. Alcohol symbolised racial and gendered separation and hierarchy. But ‘alcoholic insanity’ revealed the cracks in this logic. While legal access to alcohol was an entitlement of race, those suffering from ‘alcoholic insanity’ before World War II were almost exclusively Europeans. Yet popular discourse linked native races, alcohol and madness, and thus justified exclusion and protection.

Elite Fijians, such as Taveta, were pivotal in the maintenance of racialised lines. Colonialism in Fiji worked through co-option of and cooperation with the indigenous elite, as Barton so clearly reminded the Great Council of Chiefs in 1936. Fijians like Taveta had their behaviour and drinking scrutinised, and the hegemonic discourse that ‘natives’ cannot hold their liquor lingered for many decades. Europeans such as Michael let the side down, and his punishment was evident in his insanity. Colonial Fiji certainly had an alcohol problem but it also had a race problem, full of contradictions.

The 1960s were a decade of unprecedented change in Fiji – not least in regard to alcohol.¹²⁶ Access was no longer an entitlement of race (although gendered boundaries remained), but access and desire were influenced by money, product commodification and advertising. ‘Alcoholic insanity’ was no longer a medical term and was replaced by ‘substance abuse’, which, in Fiji, as in many other countries, included psychiatric concern about cannabis use. In post-colonial Fiji white man’s kava has been legally available to all adults and is firmly entangled with local cultures. As in the colonial era, a strong anti-alcohol lobby persists, fuelled by religion and sometimes entangled with indigenous nationalism. Kava is consumed by people of all communities in Fiji – albeit predominately by men. It is now also exported globally, but more than ever has become a symbol of Fijian culture and pride.