Читать книгу The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom - Thomson Basil - Страница 19

The first effects of foreign interference was to strengthen the power of the chiefs; the second, to destroy it. For more than two years Mbau enjoyed a monopoly of muskets, which enabled her almost to double the extent of her territory. To the eastward the kingdom of Somosomo swallowed up the whole of Taveuni and the eastern portion of Vanua Levu, while the Tongan immigrants under Maafu first conquered the Lau group, and then threatened the independence of Mbau itself. The immediate effect of subjugation was to blight the traditions and religion of the conquered tribe, for independence is as necessary to their life as light and air to the life of a plant. It is astonishing how quickly the status of a Fijian is reflected in his bearing. In an assemblage of Fijians an unskilled eye can pick out the members even of tribes who were subdued within the memory of men still living, by their slinking gait, their shifty eye, and the humble curve of their spine. A few years have changed them from warriors into beaten curs. Their chief, a hewer of wood like themselves, ceases at once to inspire respect; they approach him now without crying the tama, the prerogative he used to share with the gods themselves; they keep the tama for their alien conqueror and his gods; of their own they pretend to have forgotten the very name, nor dare they any more to claim tauvu relationship with any cousin-tribe that has preserved its freedom. They have dropped out of the social fabric, and chief and subject alike spend their lives in weaving ignoble plots to alleviate the squalor of their servitude.