Fiji

Fiji is an archipelago in the South Pacific, in the middle of Oceania, made up of more than three hundred islands, only about a hundred of them inhabited. Nearly 900,000 people live there, mostly on the two large islands, around the capital, Suva. Where Melanesia meets Polynesia, Fiji has a feature rare in the Pacific: alongside the Indigenous Fijians, who are the majority, more than a third of the population are Indo-Fijians, descendants of workers brought from India.

Unlike the flat atolls of many archipelagos, Fiji's large islands are volcanic and mountainous, covered in rainforest, waterfalls and plantations of sugar cane and coconut palms. Around them lie countless small islands ringed by turquoise lagoons, white-sand beaches and coral reefs among the finest in the world, much loved by divers. The climate is tropical, hot and humid, and the islands lie in the path of cyclones. The 180th meridian, the line on which the international date line is based, runs across the island of Taveuni.

Fiji was settled about three thousand years ago by Austronesian navigators of the Lapita culture, who colonised the Pacific. The islands developed feared warrior chiefdoms. A British colony from 1874, Fiji was transformed by a colonial decision: to keep Fijians out of the sugar plantations, the British brought more than sixty thousand indentured workers from India between 1879 and 1916. Their descendants, the Indo-Fijians, made up nearly half the population in the 1980s and are more than a third today. Since independence in 1970, tensions between the two communities have led to several coups.

Fiji has three official languages, one for each people and a shared one: Fijian, an Austronesian language, Fiji Hindi, which grew out of the dialects of the Indian indentured workers, and English, inherited from colonial rule. Religion follows the same line: Indigenous Fijians are strongly Christian, mostly Methodist, while Indo-Fijians are mostly Hindu or Muslim. Temples, mosques and churches stand side by side.

Indigenous Fijian culture revolves around kava (yaqona), a ceremonial drink made from a root, shared in a circle at welcome rituals and gatherings. Life follows the rhythm of the village, the clan and customary land; people greet each other with "Bula!" ("life"); they sing and dance the meke. Indo-Fijian culture adds its own: curries, roti, and the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali.