Page 32 - IB October 2021

Opinion Opinion

FIJI MADE ME, BUT WHICH

FIJI IS MINE?

By Brij V Lal in 1949 courtesy of Ramakrishna Mission whose motto was:
Satya Men Vijayete. The Truth shall set you free.
‘Three scores and ten’ is the age allotted to humans, the Then came the University of the South Pacific in 1968 just
Good Book tells us. Modern medicine might add 10 odd years, as we were completing high school. The founding of that
but the end is in sight, the shadow lengthening visibly. institution marked a turning point in the history of Fiji and
By that measure, my time is up or will soon be. I am a the broader Pacific region. Until then, only a small number
late Second World War Fijian, now marching lock, stock, and of students on government or their parent’s scholarship went
barrel into niggling dotage. Ours has been an improbable abroad for tertiary education. After USP, tertiary education
journey. ‘One step at a time’ could have been the motto of became available to bright students from poor families. To
our generation. USP, our generation owes more than it is possible to express in
Our children find the time and place that formed (and words.
deformed) us challenging. Our grandchildren think I am Many hurdles had to be crossed before we could enter
positively hallucinating when I tell them that I was born in the portals of that institution. There was an external exam
my parents’ house on a farm, like most village children of at each step of the way. First there was the Entrance Exam
the time, that I grew up without electricity, running water or which determined whether we could qualify for a place in a
paved roads, that we walked barefoot to school after com- secondary school. At high school, we did Fiji Junior Exam, NZ
pleting our daily allotted household chores. School Certificate and finally NZ University Entrance. A few
No television, no internet, no iPads, Instagram, Facebook, years before us, students sat for Junior and Senior Cambridge

Fiji was a country of cacophonous voices, sometimes discordant even,
but that was a condition for a vibrant democratic society. The Parlia-
ment was not a bull pit for belligerent politicians with insufferable egos
and overweening ambition. The Parliament was the people’s house to
discuss matters with dignity and decorum (and, yes, a bit of pungent
humour, too).

WhatsApp, and God knows what else. ‘But, Grandpa, what did empire-wide exams.
you do?’ A good question. Failure in any of these usually meant the end of schooling
Despite the limitations of time and technology, we not only and all that it represented. We had no sense of entitlement
survived but triumphed. We may have started with nothing, and often no second chances either. That we passed at all was
but we achieved much and went places beyond the imagina- a miracle given what we had to wade through in our classes.
tive grasp of the folks before us. We like to think that we Our primary cohort began with The Caribbean Readers after
were the original lucky generation of Fijians. which we moved on to Oxford African Series, before finally
The world was opening when we arrived on the scene. landing on University of London’s ‘Reading for Meaning’ after
Radio was connecting us to the world and to ourselves, Pan Ami Chandra’s Hindi Pothis introduced us to the cultural heri-
Am was landing at Nadi International Airport and ocean lin- tage of India, which we shared with our unlettered parents to
ers were bringing large numbers of tourists to the islands in their great delight.
search of romance and adventure. We never imagined we High school history students, as Mr Krishna Datt will at-
would one day become tourists in their lands. test, studied such weighty topics as the Causes of World War
Primary school was put on a firmer footing. All school-age One, the Russian Revolution, the Unification of Germany and
children were expected to complete at least some portion Italy and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. And in literature,
of schooling, mastering elementary arithmetic and English to Vijay Mishra and Subramani, now both professors of English
decipher dockets or write letters. Secondary schools were no Literature, introduced us to the pleasures of the imagination
longer the rarity they had once been. Labasa Secondary, as it through the novels, poems and plays of Shakespeare, TS Eliot,
then was, opened its doors in 1954 and other schools fol- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters,
lowed. In Viti Levu, Shri Vivekananda High (SVH) became the Joseph Conrad, and John Steinbeck. Their words still roam
first non-government, non-Christian secondary school to start around in my mind.

32 Islands Business, October 2021