Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui

"Fear God and honour the Queen."

1 Peter 2:17, the Word of God revealed to the first Pope.

And 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 her in-out-in-out relationship with the Commonwealth, which was given its latest, unusually happy twist today.

No wonder that the loudest cheers have rightly come from Australia and New Zealand. The Queen is still on Fijian bank notes and Fijian stamps. The Union Flag is still in the corner of the Fijian flag. Fiji provides plenty of troops for the British Army. And so on. For 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.

The whole constitutional order is apparently up for renegotiation. I think that we can all see where this is heading, or at least ought to be heading: back to the pre-1987 situation of stable, civilian rule, before the ball was dropped by the refusal to guarantee to the Melanesians both, on the one hand, the continuation of the Crown, and, on the other hand, half the parliamentary seats and various measures derived explicitly from their, mostly Methodist, Christianity of the Victorian missionary stripe. The other half of the population, of Indian indentured descent, is overwhelmingly non-Christian.

Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui.

Fear God and honour the Queen.

And after restoration there, where next? Christianity of the Victorian missionary stripe is also very much definitive of many other peoples whose chiefs might decide that they could do with a Paramount Chief. In Zimbabwe, say. Or in South Africa.