Naitasiri Province - Politics and History

Politics and History

Naitasiri Province has ninety six villages divided into the five districts of Naitasiri ,Lomaivuna, Waimaro, Matailobau and Wainimala. Naitasiri is governed by a Provincial Council, chaired by Ratu Ilaitia Tuisese.Its provincial center is at the rural town and government station of Vunidawa in Matailobau District.

In 1945 the hill province of Colo East was joined to Naitasiri province in a colonial native administration restructure.The province's people are renowned for their fiercely independent and warrior (bati) character.The earliest recorded white contact with Colo hill tribes is credited to Rev Williams in 1858. However it was after Reverend Frederick Langham, the Wesleyan minister journeyed to Christianize the Taukei ni Waluvu in 1862 that more coastal and white contact became regular. In 1867 on his fateful journey to Christianize hill tribes in Colo West, Rev Thomas Baker also travelled through Naitasiri and Colo East. Baron Anatole Von Hugel, also explored the Province in his journey through Namosi and Waimaro in 1875-77.

On 22 January 1875 at Navuso, Naitasiri,colonial administrators along with Ratu Cakobau and his two sons who had returned from Sydney, Australia briefed some eight-hundred hill chiefs and their tribal retinues on the implications of Fiji’s new status as a Colony. Ratu Cakobau and his two sons had been sick with measles on the trip back to Levuka. With no quarantine laws in place, they inadvertently carried with them the disease from aboard the HMS Dido to Navuso. The measles epidemic that befell Fiji in 1875 from January to about June 1875 and wiped out 30 per cent or 50,000 of its indigenous population was a tragedy of the first order.

Cakobau's Christianization campaigns of heathen hill tribes in 1873 were followed by colonial pacification campaigns launched by Governor Sir Arthur Gordon in the Colo Provinces of Viti Levu in 1875. This was brought to a close in 1876 with a pardoning of belligerent hill tribes. Colonial administrator AB Brewster in the 1880s in his book "The Hill Tribes of Fiji" provided the first ethnological study of the Province's hill people.

The province's traditional political alligence is with the Kubuna Confederacy of Bau as cemented with the Vunivalu of Bau Ratu Seru Cakobau's eldest daughter's marriage to the Qaranivalu of Naitasiri.The other prominent chiefs of the province are the Taukei ni Waluvu of Matailobau and Tui Waimaro of Waimaro.

The formation of the political party Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua (SDL) United Fiji Party after the May coup of 2000 was on the initiative of the chiefs and people of Naitasiri.The SDL party won both the 2001 and 2006 national political elections however in December 2006 it was deposed by a military coup d'état.