Deep Field

by Tom Bamforth

  But European trading and religious encounters with the Fijian islands had not started well. In the Fiji National Museum, alongside relics of great ocean-going canoes and intricate if dusty ancient carvings and woven baskets, was a small glass case celebrating the first missionary contact with Fiji. Inside was a Bible and a pair of spectacles belonging to the early Methodist missionary Thomas Baker, who had arrived in Fiji in the 1860s. In the case next to it was the pot and ceremonial fork with which he had been subsequently devoured—an extreme, if understandable, response to a cultural invasion that was only rectified in the 1990s as descendents of the Baker family and those of the local chief met to apologise in Fiji’s by now deeply Methodist capital and, in a rather jovial encounter, they agreed not to do it again.

  But the fuel of colonialism, religion and the newly emerging politics of independent Fiji caused flickering tensions that undermined Fiji’s cosy image as both a half-forgotten imperial outpost and a cheap tourist suntrap. In the words of the disenchanted National Fiji Party (a political party that represented Indian canegrowers who had arrived in Fiji in the nineteenth century as indentured labour):

  Britain bequeathed the Westminster system of government to Fiji and it has worked … since independence in spite of the lingering remains of an old feudal system: Government by the descendents of the Great Chiefs who clubbed and ate their way to power in these islands centuries ago.

  But the role and importance of the ‘Great Chiefs’, while extremely important today, was itself a product of European, Indian and Fijian claims to cultural and political dominance—a fusion of tradition, invention and attempts to balance ethnic power in the colonies. It is often said of Fiji that its political turbulence is the product of competition between two particularly mismatched peoples—Fijians and Indo-Fijians—who are forced to cohabit a small set of islands while embodying mutually exclusive worlds. ‘Even the prostitutes are ethnically divided,’ I was told one night at Suva’s Royal Yacht Club, where rusting brass sailing trophies and faded photographs of Europeans in evening dress lined the walls of the bar, aka the ‘poop deck’, an unimaginable social phenomenon in what was rapidly becoming, in parts, a South Pacific Ibiza.

  Indo-Fijians, in this view, were the opposite of Fijians. A polytheistic community set against the evangelical monotheism of the islands, urban verses rural, Indian entrepreneurialism verses the Fijian status quo. Above all, disputes were about land and political power, with land as something that could be bought and sold and used for cash crops by Indians but seen as inalienable and collectively owned by Fijians. Indo-Fijians were increasingly perceived as a threat, initially by Europeans concerned that they may harbour links with India’s own independence movements, and later by Fijians worried that an Indo-Fijian demographic advantage would translate into electoral power under the post-independence Westminster system. Fiji’s ‘coup culture’ (two coups in 1987, another in 2000 and again in 2006) was in large part caused by the politics of ethnicity.

  But if the political fault lines of modern Fiji were a product of a colonial legacy, so too were some of the country’s main institutions and cultural concepts. The Grand Council of Chiefs, and the status attached to its members, was not an ancient assembly of ‘big men’—it was established under colonial rule as a means, in part, of placating Fijians worried about the growing influence of recently arrived Indians. ‘Traditional’ Fijian values of vanua—collective ownership of land and ancestral connection to it—were equally recent. In this view, possession of land and traditions of indigenous government were conflated, and land came to refer to the more emotive concept of ‘ancestral homeland’ in which chiefs took on the role of perpetual custodians of Fijian identity, land and culture. This was an idea that was reinforced by the newly introduced religious enthusiasms of the Pacific. Christianity was fused onto the existing social order and chiefly hierarchies came to be seen as both the embodiment of cultural traditions and divinely ordained. The Fijian paramount chiefs came to believe that their authority had been directly handed down by God. The consequences of colonialism, conversion and migration from the subcontinent combined to change and entrench ethnicised perceptions of the political, economic and cultural sources of authority in Fiji.

  ‘This used to be John Scott’s house,’ I was told over dinner one evening with some colleagues from the Red Cross. We had been taken to a large and imposing colonial mansion in Suva that had been converted into a Chinese-run restaurant advertising the nation’s finest sizzling Angus steak. It was a deeply unfortunate historical irony, as I learned during the dinner while rapidly losing my interest in food—it had been the family home of a former head of the Fiji Red Cross, who had been killed with a cane knife along with his gay partner shortly after the military coup in 2000. This tragic and brutal murder also revealed the depth of change and social tension that lay behind the country’s sunny facade.

  The Scott family had arrived as Methodist missionaries in Fiji in the mid-1800s and had risen to prominence as jurists and colonial administrators in the century that followed, owning islands, hosting sunset cocktail parties on the balcony of the Pacific Hotel overlooking Suva Harbour, and receiving knighthoods and acclamations from the Queen on a royal tour of her palm-clad Pacific dominions. Theirs was a Pacific of the old colonial elite which, with its medals, uniforms, hierarchies and titles, saw itself a as modern European incarnation of the ‘traditional’ Fijian nobility that it had done so much to create both in and after its own image. The Scott family was the first to own a Rolls Royce in the country.

  While most of the European residents, administrators and traders left Fiji after independence in 1970, the Scott family, along with a handful of other European settler families, stayed on alternating between life in Fiji and careers in the UK and New Zealand. John Scott eventually returned permanently to Fiji as director of the Fiji Red Cross—an institution that, while serving the greater good, also closely replicated local social hierarchies. For this talented administrator and member of the much diminished European elite, the Fiji Red Cross provided an institution of both social status and influence that matched the family’s traditional prominence in Fijian society. The annual Fiji Red Cross Ball was the social event and fundraiser of the year, where men in uniform and women in ball gowns and tiaras danced through the evening like colonial socialites, presided over by the country’s new elite.

  The military coup of 2000, led by Fijian ultra-nationalist and former army officer George Speight, was triggered by the election of Fiji’s first Indian prime minister. The coup led the Red Cross and its director to play a direct and prominent humanitarian role. Using his personal standing and the mandated responsibilities of the Red Cross, John Scott became in many ways the media image of Fiji’s political chaos. True to the Red Cross’s mandate during conflict, he was able to cross the rebel lines surrounding parliament and deliver medical supplies and assistance to the parliamentarians locked inside. Wearing a white tabard with the Red Cross emblem on it, he was seen daily walking alone between the masked gunmen who surrounded the government buildings to assist and monitor the conditions of those inside—a nerve-wracking daily undertaking that was filmed and broadcast around the world, earning him the nickname ‘angel of mercy’.

  In other ways, however, John Scott and his partner stood out. Possibly still inhabiting the world of his parents and grandparents in which membership of the governing elite precluded censure, Scott was known for his good looks, wealthy lifestyle, and for being openly gay in a culturally conservative, evangelical Christian country that viewed homosexuality as a sin. Initially, the couple’s murder was thought to have been a direct consequence of Scott’s role during the coup, but the causes were deeper. Scott’s gardener, a deeply devout but mentally unstable rugby player, had learned the evangelical lessons too well. He was possibly also gay and was thought to have had an affair with Scott, his partner or both of them. Seeing Scott again on television as the ‘angel of mercy’ seems to have fused a toxic mix of sex, sexuali
ty and politics in an already unwell mind governed by an overzealous interpretation of Christian scripture. A few days after hacking his employers to death, the murderer turned himself in.

  This story, told in the Scott family’s former home (now restaurant) in Suva, seemed to capture both tragedy and change in Fiji. It was a lethal mix of postcolonial influences: ethnic politics, invented traditions and cultural confusion. The victim was a member of a European elite who may not have fully realised the days of untouchability were over in Fiji. The perpetrator, misguided by a set of religious, social and cultural norms that early European settlers and missionaries (including the Scott family) had brought to the Fiji islands was also, in some senses, a victim of the country’s mutating politics and traditions.

  The origins of humanitarian work are routinely attributed to a chance encounter between a famously moustachioed Swiss businessman, Henri Dunant (a sort of Florence Nightingale of the Red Cross Movement) and the combined forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France and Sardinia at the battle of Solferino in 1859, in which more than 40,000 soldiers died or were injured in fifteen hours of semi-industrial carnage. In his book A Memory of Solferino, which is in many ways the foundational document of modern humanitarian work, Dunant begins by describing the pageantry and bravery of European aristocrats who, with true blue-blooded valour, charged into the thick of battle at the head of suicidally loyal troops, only to enjoy a convivial dinner with each other in the evening. In a little-quoted footnote, Dunant describes a merry après-slaughter scene in which the victorious French and defeated Austrian generals reminisce over a few bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the company of the Sardinian King Vittorio Emmanuele (future monarch of a united Italy).

  “Now that you are friends” said the King laughing “sit side by side and talk”. The generals could now ask one another about the details of the battle. One look at the Austrian General’s loyal smile was enough evidence that all the bitterness was over. As for the French General, we all know that he had no reason for feeling any. Such is war; such is the life of a soldier. These two generals who were so friendly that autumn, will perhaps be fighting each other again next year, and then dine again together somewhere the year following!

  What saves Dunant’s in many ways boy scout–like account of one of the most terrible battles of its day, however, is a keen appreciation of its horror. While it has the typical array of gallant uniforms, blaring trumpets, glorious changes and heroic last stands around the sacred regimental flag, the book is also a graphic account of mass killing. Uniquely, the shocking descriptions of slaughter to which the non-aristocratic soldiery were subjected do not end on the battlefield. By far the worst are kept for accounts of the operating theatre before the days of anaesthetic. In a description that captures some of the growing professionalism of medicine as well as its intense brutality and frequent incompetence, A Memory of Solferino includes this harrowing amputation scene for a broken leg that had become gangrenous.

  The surgeon began to separate the skin from the muscles under it … Then he cut the away the flesh from the skin and raised the skin about an inch, like a sort of cuff … and with a vigorous movement cut right through the muscles with his knife, as far as the bone. A torrent of blood burst from the arteries, covering the surgeon and dripping on to the floor … The orderly had little experience and did not know how to stop the haemorrhage by applying his thumb to the blood vessels in the right way … It was now indeed time for the saw, and I could hear the grating of the steel as it entered the living bone and separated the half-rotten limb from the body.

  Also crucial to the account is the observation that wars did not only involve soldiers but civilians and social institutions as well. Expressing horror at the way the killing continued in churches, where fleeing enemy soldiers sought refuge behind an altar, despite the church’s weak promise of protection as a ‘house of peace’, Dunant concluded that some people and places should be internationally recognised as hors de combat—‘out of the fight’. These included prisoners of war, the injured, medical orderlies, hospitals and cultural institutions such as churches that, nominally at least, offered protection. More important still was Dunant’s observation of the roles played by civilians, especially women, in providing aid, assistance, medical support, food, shelter and basic life-saving humanitarian necessities to the pathetic remains of people who, only a few hours before, had been able-bodied soldiers—irrespective of which side they had fought on. These civilian volunteers formed spontaneous aid committees and provided, with few resources and little experience, the relief services that the armies themselves did not provide and did so instinctively, without discrimination the basis of the soldiers’ origins. Despite the best of intentions, qualified help was rare:

  Oh how valuable it would have been … to have a hundred experienced and qualified voluntary orderlies and nurses. Such a group would have formed a nucleus around which could have been rallied the scanty help and dispersed efforts which needed competent guidance … most of those who brought their own goodwill to the task lacked the necessary knowledge and experience, so that their efforts were inadequate and often ineffective.

  While witnessing the event, Dunant himself strove to do as much as his background in the Swiss banking industry allowed him—the provision of bandages, cigars and pipes to wounded soldiers whose thick fug of burning tobacco would, he hoped, restore calm and hide the stench of rotting flesh. However effective his own interventions might have been, the broader lessons had been learnt. A Memory of Solferino called for a convention ‘inviolate in character’, which would form the basis for societies devoted to the relief of the wounded in wartime. ‘Humanity and civilization,’ Dunant wrote, ‘call imperiously for such an organization’. Strikingly, the appeal was made not just to the European aristocracy, but universally: to people of ‘all countries and all classes … to ladies as well as men’. It was an appeal for the creation of a humanitarian agency made to ‘every nation, every district, and every family, since no man can say with certainty that he is forever safe from the possibility of war’. The result was the signing of the First Geneva Convention ‘for the amelioration of the wounded in armies in the field’ by all twelve European heads of state in 1864 and the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as the professional relief service, along with country-specific Red Cross societies that would form the civilian volunteer base needed for relief work.

  But the ‘imperious call’ of humanity and civilisation was heard not only by Dunant and the founders of the Red Cross Movement but by individuals, organisations and states that have variously interpreted what the terms ‘humanity’ and ‘civilisation’ actually are, and the means by which they might be achieved. Where the Red Cross sought to limit the destructive power of war, the professionalisation of military medicine and nursing was already well underway through the efforts of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856. While Dunant had admired Nightingale and acknowledged her as one the inspirations behind the founding of the Red Cross, Nightingale was more sceptical. In her view, such an organisation would only ease the responsibility for, and cost of, the care of wounded soldiers on war ministries and would paradoxically encourage them to go to war.

  A prime motivation for nineteenth-century charitable societies was the concept of the ‘deserving poor’, who could be both materially aided and brought into the Christian fold. In 1865 another ostensibly humanitarian international institution was established, this time combining religious obscurantism with military hierarchy: the Salvation Army. The 1865 motto under which these soldiers of salvation marched was the ‘three Ss’ that would be delivered to the ‘down-and-outs’—‘soup, soap, and salvation’. The Salvation Army’s founder, ‘General’ William Booth, inverted the then current conceptions about the Dark Continent (Africa) and applied them to the newly industrialised society of mid-nineteenth-century England in his book Darkest England and the Way Out. Applying the imperial concept of the �
��civilizing mission’ to parts of England itself, Booth observed that intense poverty, alcoholism and generally heathen behaviour existed in equal measure in England as it did in Africa. He formed his ‘army’ in order to deliver ‘mankind from misery, either in this world or the next’ and to facilitate the ‘regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ’. When discussing the need for a volunteer army to tackle poverty and irreligion at the heart of the imperial metropolis itself, Booth is said to have cried: ‘I’m not a volunteer, I’m a regular soldier’.

  William Booth’s concept of a Salvation Army ministering to the urban poor was a domestic version of what would become a greater ideological justification for imperial rule and even expansion, especially in the 1890s ‘scramble for Africa’. Empires were expanding beyond their role as essentially state-backed private companies, such as the British East India Company, which was motivated by the incentive of monopoly profits rather than by the idea of good governance or ‘saving souls’. This coincided with a rise in evangelical Christianity and, at least in theory, a rejection of outright commercialism and Christian pietism. In this new, ‘muscular’ form of evangelical endeavour, the role of the state was central in realising the practical ambitions of conquest and conversion as well as the notion that religious truth could be found through ‘good works’. In this context the idea that ‘trade followed the flag’, and that the flag represented liberal rule and moral progress, underpinned the imperial ideal of the ‘civilising mission’—variously represented in France, Britain and the United States as ‘white man’s burden’ and Manifest Destiny. For Cecil Rhodes, the arch-imperial mining magnate and South African politician whose Rhodes scholarships sought to create a ruling imperial elite who would combine scholarly and sporting achievement with moral force, ‘colonialism is philanthropy plus five per cent’.