Tuesday 25 August 2009

Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui

"Fear God and honour the Queen."

Still the motto of Fiji, despite the abolition of the monarchy in 1987, in the first of an ongoing series of military coups, the cause of expulsion from the Commonwealth, although no one really sees that as permanent.

Kwame Kwei-Armah seemed baffled that the Queen was still on the bank notes. She is also still on the stamps. The Union Flag is still in the corner of the flag, just as in Australia, or New Zealand, or Saint Helena. Fiji provides plenty of troops for the British Army. And so on.

Well, why ever not? The Queen remains Paramount Chief of the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji, and the President must be from one of those chiefly families, acknowledging as they do the Queen as Paramount. Who is really the Head of State there? No wonder that the latest unelected military ruler has suspended that Council.

And when was Fiji better off? Before 1987, when she was peaceable and had an elected government? Or since, when she is for ever having military coups?

Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui.

Fear God and honour the Queen.

6 comments:

  1. Break Dancing Jesus25 August 2009 at 16:38

    Your deluded neo-imperialist fantasies continue unabated. Hawaii has a union jack in its flag but it does not mean anything.

    The man who spits on the funeral pyres of the victims of the Amritser massacre indeed.

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  2. "Fear God and Honour The King (sic)" is actually a phrase on most Orange Lodge arches here. I think there is a Fiji Orange Lodge.

    Cant actually see Fiji returning to Commonwealth. It may have a British flag within its national flag. So does Hawaii and I cant see it rejoining Commonwealth either.

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  3. John, it's from 1 Peter 2:17, making it the words of the first Pope.

    Fiji will come back when it calms down. Queen on the banknotes, and all that. Don't hold your breath, though. If only they'd kept her on rather more than the bank notes.

    Ah, poor, sweet, simple BDJ. He seems quite unaware that the Fijians' continuing ties to Britain are entirely their own choice.

    Nor can he spell "Amritsar" correctly. Perhaps, like the warmongers' court historian, Andrew Roberts (hagiographer of Halifax who went hunting with Goering, addresser of meetings of the apartheid-restorationist Springbok Club), he imagines that city to be in southern India? And perhaps he shares Roberts's view, expressed three times in a book much admired by George Bush, that the Red Army "marched eastwards across Europe"?

    No, probably not. BDJ would have to know that Amritsar was in India at all. And he would have to have heard of the Red Army, which, if I anything, he no doubt assumes to be a reference to Manchester United.

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  4. Queen is no longer on Fiji money its now local flora and founa

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  5. how did they learn to speak english

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