Fiji is an archipelago nation of more than three hundred islands in the southwestern Pacific, of which about a third are inhabited. Settled by ocean voyagers some three thousand years ago and ceded to Britain in 1874, it became a sugar colony worked by indentured laborers carried from India, whose descendants, the Indo-Fijians, came to live alongside the indigenous iTaukei. Independent since 1970 and shaken by four coups since 1987, Fiji is today the hub of the independent Pacific, a country still defined by the effort of two peoples to share one land.
On the tenth of October, 1874, a Fijian high chief signed his islands over to Queen Victoria. On the tenth of October, 1970, Fiji took them back. The colonial era opened and closed on the very same date, ninety-six years apart to the day, as if the calendar were keeping score. It was no accident: the independence date was chosen to answer the day of surrender. But the country handed back in 1970 was not the one signed away. Britain had filled it, in the years between, with a second people carried from India to cut its sugar, and the question of how those two peoples would share one small archipelago had only just begun.