Column 9 -- Prophet Mohammed’s Birthday

This is the ninth column in a serialization of PACIFIC FLASH: A Year in FIJI by Gerry Takano. Gerry's journal, A Year in Levuka Fiji, will be available for purchase online soon.

Fiji’s education ministry acknowledged, with great appreciation, the contribution of the Muslim communities to Fiji’s development during the celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s Birthday. Always extending the image of a diverse Fiji, the government’s holiday reflected the belief that all religions in the world have commonality. Politically, through the 1990s, Fiji’s Muslim community promoted political representation based on their distinct linguistic, religious and cultural heritage from the Fijian Hindu community.

On Prophet Mohammed’s Day, apart from the Muslim ceremonies elsewhere, several of us trekked for four hours deep through the Ovalau Mountains and into the Lovoni Crater. Our guide was a young Lovoni college-educated woman whose Fijian dad was very supportive of my stay here. The trail was familiar with ginger and lush foliage, except for an occasional iguana or brilliant butterflies. From the top of the crater, we looked down onto the Lovoni village. The Lovoni chief reigned over a savusavu (welcoming ceremony); then, soon after a soothing kava drink, we swam at the nearby stream.

R.A. Derrick, author of A History of Fiij, first published in 1946, gave a concise account of the Lovoni contact with Cakobau at Levuka. This transaction, politically astute and strategically keen, paved the way for the new nation.When in June, 1871, a government was at length established, the funds for its launching were provided from an unexpected and quite unlikely source. Early in the year the Lovoni, who were near neighbours and old enemies of the Europeans at Levuka, refused to pay a tax which had been levied upton them by Cakobau... Disaffection soon ripened into open hostility, with threats…Cakobau sent a friendly gift of tabua (whale’s tooth)…within a few days they (Lovonis) waylaid the chief of Yarovudi, and having hacked him into pieces with battleaxes, added insult to his tribe by eating the body.

Gerry Takano was reared in Honolulu, Hawaii and received his architectural education and early training in upstate New York and Boston. Gerry served as Hawaii’s National Trust Advisor and State of Hawaii Commissioner of the Historic Sites Review Board.

He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be reached at gertkno@aol.com