The Land That Cannot Be Sold

The resort on the beach at Korotogo does not own the beach. It does not own the ground the bures stand on either, and it never will, because there is no legal mechanism by which it could. What it holds is a lease from the iTaukei Land Trust Board — ninety-nine years at the long end — granted on behalf of a landowning group whose members are listed by name in a register. When the lease ends, the buildings revert. This is not an unusual arrangement in Fiji. It is very nearly the only one.

Around 87 per cent of the country is iTaukei customary land, held collectively and inalienable: it cannot be sold, mortgaged or transferred out of the group that holds it, to a foreigner or to another Fijian. Something like six per cent is freehold, most of it created before 1874 and clustered around the old sugar towns, and the few per cent left over is state land. Almost everything a visitor does here happens on the 87 per cent, and almost every argument Fiji has had with itself for a century and a half comes back to it.

What Gordon decided

Ratu Seru Cakobau and twelve other chiefs signed the Deed of Cession at Nasova, a kilometre outside Levuka, on 10 October 1874. Britain had not especially wanted Fiji and took it partly to impose order on a settler land rush that was already well advanced. Sir Arthur Gordon, who arrived as governor the following year, had watched what alienation had done to indigenous populations elsewhere and made two decisions that have outlasted everything else about the colonial period. Customary land would not be sold to settlers. And Fijians would not be taxed off it into plantation labour.

Sixty thousand people

The second decision made the first one expensive. A sugar colony with a protected indigenous population and no labour force has to import one. The Leonidas docked in May 1879 with just under five hundred indentured labourers from India aboard; recruitment ran until 1916 and the last contracts were cancelled on 1 January 1920. About sixty thousand people came under the system, and most stayed. Their descendants could clear the land, work the land, lease the land and pay for the land. Under the rule Gordon had written, they could never own it.

Two protections were written in the same decade and they turned out to be the same protection: the land could not be taken from the people who held it, and it could not be reached by the people brought in to work it.

Nineteen ninety-seven

The machinery for leasing it out came later. The Native Land Trust Ordinance of 1940, driven through by Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, created a single board to administer every lease on customary land on the owners' behalf; it was renamed the iTaukei Land Trust Board in 2011 and does the same job. Agricultural tenancies were standardised separately, by the Agricultural Landlord and Tenant Act, which from 1976 fixed a minimum term of thirty years. The arithmetic of that is obvious in hindsight and was obvious at the time. A very large number of cane leases fell due from 1997 onwards, and a great many were not renewed.

What followed is visible from the Kings Road: empty farmhouses in the cane belt, and squatter settlements on the edges of Lautoka and Nadi that were not there before. Sugar output peaked at 517,000 tonnes in 1994, held near 450,000 through the rest of the decade and came in at 126,500 in 2025, the lowest in the corporation's history; the collapse of the leases hit at the same time as the European Union reformed its sugar regime, cutting the guaranteed price by 36 per cent from 2006 and terminating the Sugar Protocol outright in 2009. Two arguments run alongside each other here and both are honest. Landowning groups had waited thirty years to use land that was legally theirs and had watched the rent lag behind what the crop was worth. Tenant families had cleared, drained and improved one block for three generations, had nowhere to go, and experienced the expiry as being made foreign in the country they were born in. Indians outnumbered indigenous Fijians in every census from 1946 until the late 1980s; by 2007, the last census whose ethnic breakdown was ever published, the Indo-Fijian share had fallen to 37 per cent, and emigration is the reason. The 2017 census released no ethnic figures at all — the attorney-general told parliament none had been collected, the census commissioner said he would release them if a higher authority allowed it, and in a country where the entire land settlement turns on who counts as which, the silence was itself an argument.

And the water

Customary tenure does not stop at the tideline. A qoliqoli is a registered customary fishing ground covering the foreshore, the reef and the water above it, and every beach, lagoon and dive site on this route sits inside one. Legal title to the seabed and foreshore has been held by the state since the colonial period while the qoliqoli right of use is recognised alongside it, an arrangement nobody has ever found tidy. In 2006 the Qoliqoli Bill proposed to hand proprietary ownership of those areas to the registered customary owners outright, and hotels and dive operators began calculating what access would then cost. Fiji had already had three coups — May and September 1987, and May 2000 — each mounted in the name of indigenous political paramountcy. December 2006 ran the other way: Commodore Frank Bainimarama demanded the withdrawal of the Qoliqoli Bill and two other pieces of legislation he described as racially preferential, and when they were not withdrawn he took power on 5 December. Whether that is the honest account of 2006, or a justification assembled afterwards, is still argued in Fiji and shows no sign of resolving. What is not disputed is the outcome for the bill: it died with the parliament and has not been revived.

What you are standing on

The 2013 constitution, written under the government that grew out of that coup, abolished race-based electoral rolls — and in section 28 restated that iTaukei land remains the permanent property of its owners and can never be permanently alienated. Both halves came out of the same drafting room. A 2010 decree had already changed how the money moves: the board's administrative deduction was cut and the chiefs' preferential shares abolished, so lease income is now divided equally among every registered member of a landowning group, children included. That was popular with most of them and not with all of them, which is what you would expect of any redistribution. None of this is background. When you hand kava root to a chief before walking into a village, you are not performing something arranged for visitors; you are asking permission from the registered owners of the ground. When you pay the fee at Sawa-i-Lau, it goes to the district that owns the cave. The clearest version is the shark reef at Beqa, where two villages gave up fishing a stretch of water in 2004 and are paid a levy on every diver who enters it — an arrangement that works because there was somebody with standing to be paid, which is a question most countries cannot answer. Gordon's rule has survived four coups, four constitutions and a hundred and fifty years. It has protected one population and constrained another, and Fiji has never found a way to stop doing both at once.