The Fijian chieftaincy is the indigenous iTaukei system of hereditary titled chiefs bound to their people through the vanua, the web of land, kinship, and obligation that organizes iTaukei society. Once the framework of many independent island polities, it was formalized and frozen by British colonial rule after 1874 and remains a contested force in Fiji's politics today.
As he ceded Fiji to Britain in 1874, the chief Cakobau sent Queen Victoria the one thing he still owned that might interest her: his favourite war club, the weapon by which his family had ruled. Nearly sixty years later the British sent it back, and it became the mace that presides over Fiji's parliament. That single object holds the strange fate of the Fijian chiefs. The empire that stripped away their independence also made itself the guardian of their rank, freezing a shifting world of rival island lords into fixed titles and councils that Fijians would come to defend as their most ancient inheritance.