Life
He was born on 21 December 1908 as the son of King George Tupou II of Tonga and his Fijian "trial wife", Adi Litia Cakobau, who was a granddaughter of Seru Epenisa Cakobau, the King who forged the first unified Fijian state in 1871, before ceding the islands to the United Kingdom in 1874. Cakobau was a half-brother of Tonga's Queen Salote Tupou III.
He was educated at New Zealand's Wanganui Technical College, a public secondary school in Wanganui. School records show he attended from 1923 to 1928. After working as a schoolteacher, Cakobau commanded the Fiji Infantry Regiment in World War II, and was awarded the Military Cross. When Fiji became independent in 1970, Cakobau was knighted, becoming a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE), Ratu Edward Cakobau was also a Freemason.
Ratu Edward played a major role in Fijian politics in the years that preceded and followed independence in 1970. As Minister for Labour in the first post-independence government, Cakobau had to contend with a docker's strike for a 31 percent pay rise, at the port of Suva in May 1971.
He was a Fijian cricketer who played a single first-class match for Auckland in the 1930/31 Plunket Shield and later made two first-class appearances for Fiji in 1948 against Otago and Auckland.
Read more about this topic: Edward Cakobau
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Alvina felt herself swept ... into a dusky region where men had dark faces and translucent yellow eyes, where all speech was foreign, and life was not her life. It was as if she had fallen from her own world on to another, darker star, where meanings were all changed.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)