Part 2 This article is based on a report on land by Professor O.H.K.Spate which appeared in The Fiji Times of July 24, 1959. In his report on Fijian economic problems and prospects he claimed both Reserves and Native Land Trust Board was “essentially over-protective devices”.
From the point of view of effective land use, however, it is unfortunate that this took the form of adopting the view of the Council of Chiefs in 1877, that the mataqali was the essential unit.
This view, apparently based largely on Bauan ideas, in many areas did not correspond well with the real situation.
In Lau, for example, the proprietary units seem to have been batinilovo, in Ba and Colo West, bito, both being in essence tokatoka or its equivalent even though the mataqali might be as it were the administering unit.
Apart from the convenience of dealing with fewer units (which might however have suggested using yavusa), the view of the 1877 Council of Chiefs may we have been conditioned by the much greater importance of the mataqali in the political scheme of things, with definite functions and a ranking head, and perhaps on this account more readily subject to control.
It is important to note that this scheme, necessitated doubtless by administrative convenience, has masked and largely paralysed the very considerable flexibility and power of adjustment of the original pattern.
Pre-Cession history is a record of wars and migrations; useful refugees might be absorbed into a vanua; there were forced removals of whole vanua, sometimes to distant islands; actual expropriation of the defeated occurred, and when this did not take place the victors might enforce a variety of claims to the land or its product, claims ranging from a mere token tribute to the full usufruct of particular plants or lands.
Within the larger units differential population growth enforced redistribution of tokatoka rights.
Of course for administrative reasons, there had to be some systematisation but this led to a freezing of the status quo or what was taken to be such.
The position is well put by Cyril Belshaw, writing of the Sigatoka Valley: whether such and such a unit was a mataqali or a tokatoka or a yavusa is not really clear cut at all.
A tokatoka enlarging could become a yavusa; a yavusa enlarging could become a vanua (or the opposite could take place); the system was one of bifurcation and amalgamation in response to pressures of population or weakening men.
If I go into any village of this area today and ask a man his mataqali, he might just as easily reply with the unit officially recorded as his tokatoka or yavusa.
This is not muddleheadedness on his part; it is an essential ingredient of the traditional system.
Only those who have need to watch the legalities of the administration give the right answers assuredly.
Static as it was technologically, in accordance with its general environment, Fiji society thus was very adaptable organisationally to local variables and clearly too it called for qualities of discipline and initiative now largely lost with the solidifying of the system.
Once again we have an example of the retrospective building of “tradition” so that in most of Fiji questions of landholding must now fit into the rigid frame of the mataqali, even though the people may not spontaneously think in these terms.
Yet with a leadership prepared to experiment not on a grandiose all-Fiji scale, but carefully, where the local climate of opinion seems favourable, something of the old flexibility and power of change might be recaptured.
The essential disadvantage of mataqali holding is that there is not rational relation at all between the numbers of cultivators in any one unit and the amount of land available to them.
Natural disparities, such as the contrast between mataqali holding thousands between mataqali holding
thousands of acres in the hills and those with a few tens of acres in the plain, are irrelevant or must be accepted as given.
Of course most, if not all, human societies show great disparities in the availability of economic opportunity, and there are worse things than mataqali holding – large absentee landlordism, for example:
The point is this; in a relatively undifferentiated society of small farmers, in single villages with natural homogeneity of opportunity, ownership of land is divided into units in such a way that not only are energetic individuals given little chance of obtaining sufficient land on reasonably secure title, but the
size of the units normally does not permit effective collective working.
In extreme cases, whole mataqali may be practically denied any possibility of economic advance, while others in the same village may have more land than they can use – Reserves within Reserves, as it
were.
This is an arbitrary form of economic inequality, not dependent on natural conditions and not related to skill or effort, and it is not conductive to social solidarity.
It is thus not only anti-individual in its economic effect, but also anti-communal since it inhibits common effort.
There are other disadvantages in the mataqali system.
The basing of Reserves on mataqali claims makes it very diffi cult indeed to apply any general principal.
Where much land is leased, some mataqali or tokatoka may have large unearned incomes while their
neighbours have little or none.
