Alcohol Use and Everyday Resistance in the World of Fiji Soccer, 1980-2000 ()
1. Introduction
The Inter-District Championship (IDC) knockout trophy, held every October in Fiji, is the nation’s most prestigious soccer trophy. It has always been competed for by association or district teams from around the country, presaging by decades the establishment of a national league based on home-and-away fixtures in 1977. The IDC is one of the world’s oldest continuously-running sporting tournaments, having only being suspended once, in 1987, in the wake of Colonel Rabuka’s two military coups. We need to introduce here the team of Ba, based in Ba town, a Fiji Indian-dominated market and manufacturing town of 14,000 residents located on Viti Levu’s northern coast. Although being from one of Fiji’s smaller towns, the Ba team won six IDCs in a row from 1975-80, which resulted in wildly enthusiastic responses by local businessowners and fans in that mainly amateur era. Ba now is the only city or town in Fiji which has soccer as its number one sport, and is known as the place where people talk about soccer 24/7 rather than just on game days. The famous Soccer Ball Café on the main street boasts a 16-foot high soccer ball in the forecourt of the café, while the Ba Museum has a long side wall devoted to pictures and narratives of the history of the Ba soccer team. The national youth academy is based in Ba and the Fiji Football Association (FFA) president, Rajesh Patel, hails from there. Ba will form a key backdrop and element of this emerging sociological and historical story of Fiji soccer history, as one of the dominant teams of the 1980s and a symbol of what might-have-been had rugby not come to increasingly dominate the sporting landscape after the three-in-a-row Fiji wins at the Hong Kong Rugby 7 s from 1990-92 (James & Nadan, 2021a: p. 28).
Another reason for the mythology behind the Ba team, which has made it a beacon of hope and light and a unifying force that unites all genders, ages, and ethnicities in Ba town and hinterland, was the tragic motor vehicle death of Ba and Fiji captain Josiah “Joe” Tubuna in August 1984 (James & Nadan, 2022b; Prasad, 2013: p. 101). Tubuna was widely admired in Indigenous and sporting circles for his on-field courage, charismatic leadership qualities and forthrightness in dealing with soccer officials. In an age that was semiprofessional at best, he courted rival district teams and sold his services to the highest bidder. Tragically, his life ended one night as the utility he was in hit the back of a sugar cane truck that was parked in front of a convenience store on a remote stretch of highway between Ba and Tavua (James & Nadan, 2022b). He had been returning with two other players, Inia Bola and Semi Tabaiwalu, from a nurses’ dance held in Tavua and both suffered major injuries that effectively ended their careers. We encounter Tubuna and Tabaiwalu later in this article when we discuss their breaking of a curfew at the 1983 South Pacific Games in Apia so as to extend their enjoyable drinking session. The article also explores ethnic and racial dynamics in Fiji soccer where most management and administrative figures are ethnic Fiji Indians (Fijian citizens of South Asian descent), while most players are Indigenous Fijians (say, 75% of national-league players in the 1980s) (James & Nadan, 2019, 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2022a, 2022b).
This article, part of a broader investigation into Fiji soccer history, focuses on alcohol and everyday resistance among players in the context of the Fiji Premier League and the Fiji national team in the 1980s-90s. It highlights the role of alcohol as being a way of forging collective memories and as sometimes a tool that expresses frustration and resistance towards control by Fiji Indian team managements. Their wealth and lifestyle opportunities loom large as a spectre in the minds of Indigenous Fijians who, apart from soccer and after soccer, mostly stay as subsistence farmers in the villages and are not able to move, for various reasons, into paid employment in soccer or in related positions outside of the game such as in media. They lack capital to start businesses, as ex-players in Global North countries often do, because of the amateur nature of the sport, even at Fiji Premier League level, back in the 1980s. This contrasts too with the money earned by Indigenous Fijian rugby players overseas today. This creates not resentment, but melancholy and wistfulness as ex-players see the huge disparities in wealth between rugby stars of today that make it overseas and even the most talented soccer players of the 1980s. Wistfulness suits the context as the word is defined by the Cambridge Online Dictionary as “sad and thinking about something that is impossible or in the past”. Being moral landowners of the Fiji Islands adds to the complexity of the Indigenous ex-players’ position, and Christianity offers some sort of solace that righteousness and justice will prevail at some future time. The contradiction between being moral landowners and present poverty is really the contradiction of global capitalism, as Marx and Engels (1848/1972) explained in their classic text, The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Feudalism had been swept out of England by 1848, and the same process goes on in Fiji now where the traditional Indigenous villages stand in stark opposition to the tourist-led capitalism that we see in Nadi, Suva, and on the Coral Coast.
The main data sources in this research project are 60 hours of interviews with Henry Dyer, conducted by the first author in 2014-15, and interviews with five ex-Ba players, including Semi Tabaiwalu, and two ex-Nadi players, conducted in 2015 jointly by Dyer and the first author. Other interviews were with Mr Bobby Tikaram, ex-Airport Soccer Club president and Nadi Soccer Association administrator, and Dr Raymond Fong, ex-official team doctor for the Nadi Soccer Association team. Both interviews took place in Nadi in 2014. Dyer was then assistant village headman at Nakavu Village, Nadi. Through him, I (first author) had access to Nakavu Village and the data collected includes research notes and memories from countless conversations with villagers and ex-players, over the 2014-19 period, and participant-observation at village meetings and drinking sessions in town and village. Participant-observation included my attendance at a veterans’ dinner organized by FFA and held in Nadi in October 2014 so as to coincide with that year’s IDC and attendance in the Lautoka dressing room at the manager’s half-time address at the 2014 Battle of the Giants (BOG) final between Lautoka and Rewa. At that occasion, I saw the difference between Fiji Indian management authority, in the form of the manager’s address, and Dyer’s customary Indigenous authority, backed by his ex-player status, when he spoke words of encouragement in Fijian to an Indigenous Lautoka player who was deeply depressed because of an incident where he was taken off the ground. These are two competing realms of cultural capital (Uperesa, 2021: p. 517) and the manager only grudgingly admitted Dyer and I into the dressing room. He could not refuse as Dyer had played for Lautoka Blues in the mid-1980s in between his two stints with Nadi Jetsetters.
As mentioned, we highlight the use of alcohol by ex-players during the 1980s, in an era when beer cartons were often used to pay players rather than cash. The management style can best be described in this era as benevolent paternalism in a postcolonial context where British rule ended only in 1970. Even the presence of Fiji Indians in the country is a direct legacy of British colonialism since most Fiji Indians in Fiji today are direct descendants of the original 60,000 Girmitiyas (indentured labourers) brought by the British between 1879 and 1916 to work on the sugar cane plantations (Ali, 1980: p. 14; Gillion, 1977: p. 1; Lai, 1993: p. 189; Luker, 2005: p. 360, 367; Sharma, 2011: p. 18; Singh, n.d.: p. 23). The original Girmitiyas and their descendants were joined by Punjabi and Gujarati free settlers in the first half of the twentieth century (Ali, 1980: p. 26; Gillion, 1977: pp. 114-117; Prasad, 2008: p. 8, 18). As at 2012, the Fiji Indian community numbered around 290,129 (33.8%), out of a total population of 858,038, while Indigenous Fijians numbered 511,838 (59.7%) (Government of Fiji, 2013).
Benevolent paternalism in our context refers to the case where Fiji Indian businessmen or school-teachers found and fund soccer clubs out of dedication to the sport and kindness to the community. The cultural and social capital invested may tie in with their cultural and social capital from other areas of life such as their main employment context and temple/mosque work. These things in total give them respect and influence within the community. Although semi-feudal in origin, a Foucauldian power-knowledge framework (Foucault, 1980) can explain the relation between respect and influence which are tied together. Firstly, a soccer club adds to one’s social network and is a form of philanthropy as well as a marker for everyone suggesting commitment to and love of the sport. These roles can be traced back to the Girmitiya era (1879-1920) and the period immediately afterwards when institutions of various types had to be developed from nothing and developed quickly following Indian cultural ways in Fiji. Closely related to benevolent paternalism is the concept of cultural hegemony. The formation of simple and viable institutions from nothing provided an opportunity and a need for individuals to build institutions quickly and accomplish tasks pragmatically and with social benefits in mind.
Balram, Pang, and Knijnik (2022) suggest that Fiji Indian girls and women suffer triple marginalization, due to the patriarchal nature of Fiji Indian culture; Fiji Indians being perceived as less capable in and devoted to sport; and the lack of financial resources. The first and last factors are clearly important structural hindrances in Fiji sport. However, soccer, especially in Western Fiji, is a sport controlled and administered by Fiji Indians. Although Fiji Indian players are less than half of the Premier League men’s cohort, they are respected and many form part of the legendary pantheon of icons, including the Sami brothers, Farouk Janeman, and Vimlesh Singh (Ba), Navaneeda K. Gounder, Peter Dean, and Shiu Naicker (Nadi) and Ivor Evans, who went to play in Canada. In recent times, Roy Krishna has been the most famous soccer export, having played in India in the Indian Super League. It is the Indigenous Fijian ex-players who are marginalized in the sport postretirement in terms of ability to access careers in the game.
The study’s three research questions are as follows: 1) What explains the alcohol-related behaviour of the Fiji soccer players in the two cases we present? 2) What explains the reactions of the ex-players to the alcohol-related events at the time of data collection in 2014-15? 3) What do Indigenous Fijian ex-players think about the fact that the control of soccer rests with Fiji Indian administrators and managers?
2. Background
The situation and context of soccer in the Fiji Islands often appears unique and perhaps impenetrable to those from outside not raised in the islands. Originally, there were European-only competitions and competitions for the Fiji Indian and Indigenous Fijian communities (Prasad, 2008: p. 8). A Suva-based Indian club, Sunshine, and a Rewa-based Indian club, Sitare Hind, contested local derby matches as early as 1922, while the Indian Reform League established a club competition in Suva six years after that, in 1928 (James, Tuidraki, & Tanzil, 2022: p. 3; Prasad, 2008: pp. 10-11). It took tremendous foresight and organization, as well as financial sponsorship, to organize the first IDC tournament in 1938 because it involved Indian district teams from throughout the islands. Although it was only an annual, knockout tournament, it shows that Fiji was a relatively early adopter of national-league soccer.
By the 1950s, the current social divide where Fiji Indians support soccer and Indigenous Fijians support rugby had already been established (Prasad, 2008: p. 10). By the 1962 season, the bar on Indigenous players in the Indian leagues had been lifted and Esala Masi became the first Indigenous player to play after the ruling when he turned out for Ba in 1962 (Prasad, 2008: p. 29). A Northern Indigenous league began around 1927 in Western Fiji. A key element of the history of this league was the nine titles-in-a-row won by the famed and excellent Namoli (Lautoka) all-Indigenous side of the 1940s (Prasad, 2008: p. 9). In 1961, the Fiji Indian FA removed the word “Indian” from its name and the Indian competition history was recast as the national-league history (Prasad, 2008: p. 27).
Fiji introduced a national league of home-and-away fixtures in 1977 and there is now a second division, the Fiji Super League. Promotion and relegation exist between the Premier League and the Super League. There were eight teams in the Premier League until 2021, but the league has now increased to ten teams. The Super League has two zones, one for each major island. It is important to understand that, like 15 s rugby in New Zealand and Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia, the Premier and Super League teams are association or district teams and should not be referred to as clubs. For example, the Nadi team in the Premier League represents the Nadi Soccer Association and players are entitled to call themselves “district representatives” or “district reps”. Clubs exist at the level below the Super League and each soccer association is responsible for administering its own club competition for clubs within its district boundaries.
Western Fiji (the coastal region of Viti Levu stretching from Sigatoka through to Rakiraki) has historically been the stronghold of Fiji soccer support, along with Labasa on Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second island. These areas are not the strongest soccer areas by chance. They gained their status due to the large Fiji Indian populations of those areas that were originally based in those places because of sugarcane. Areas where there are fewer Fiji Indians, such as Suva-Nausori, the south coast of Viti Levu, and the minor outlying islands, tend to have less dedicated soccer support and hence their teams tend to be stuck in the Super League or act as yoyo teams moving regularly between the two leagues (for example, Navua and Tailevu-Naitasiri). Other minor associations are not represented in either Premier League or Super League.
The standard of Fiji soccer has dropped dramatically since the 1980s with the national team ranking dropping by 80 places. The reasons for this are many and complex, but the rise of rugby and the 1992 introduction of rugby league have been significant. Emigration of Fiji Indians, who make up the bulk of supporters, owners, and managers, has been detrimental too.
Although the IDC used to be a straight knockout tournament, and held in only one city or town per year, nowadays there is a group setup of two groups of teams, with the top two teams in each group progressing to the semifinals. Only the semifinals and the final are necessarily played in the same city or town, with earlier games sometimes being played in other locations based on where the largest crowd is expected to attend or to minimize travel costs. There is a festival atmosphere in the host-city, especially on the weekend of the finals, and in the week leading up to it. Typically, soccer enthusiasts from other regions and emigrants back in the islands on holidays gather in that one city for the week to rebuild old ties and to reminisce. Uperesa (2021: p. 511) asserts that “[s]port is one of the few sites that can unite the Diaspora and homeland in time and space”. Many soccer fans of the Fiji Indian Diaspora that do not make it back to the islands for the IDC still maintain an active interest in the games and in the results. The festival atmosphere in the host-city, during the week and weekend of the IDC finals, is similar in some respects to the Australian Aboriginal rugby league tournaments (Gorman, 2017). Here we see the coming together of the traditional and the modern in a way that the modern is contained and not utterly strange. Although most fans and administrators are Fiji Indians, ex-players are of both ethnicities, and so a kind of soccer culture has emerged that unites participants in a way that provides a rival (or, to be more exact, coexistent) basis for identification to ethnicity.
3. Methodology
I (first author) arrived in Fiji in May 2013 to take up a university lectureship. I became a supporter of the local Premier League team in my city, Lautoka Blues. One afternoon, I had left campus to have lunch in Nadi. After lunch and two beers, I decided not to go back to the campus as I had no teaching or other commitments in the afternoon. I kept walking along the east side of the main street and soon left the tourist part of the town-centre behind me. Later, I saw a simple, working-class style pub and entered just to see what it was like. I began talking at the bar to a couple of individuals. One of them was Henry Dyer, former Nadi, Lautoka, and Fiji central-midfielder and assistant headman at Nakavu Village, Nadi. We struck up a rapport and I became convinced that his story about being a retired soccer hero was legitimate. Dyer and I agreed that I would co-write his memoir book and that I could publish any academic journal articles that might emerge from the project.
We met at various Nadi venues most Thursday afternoons from May 2014 to April 2015 to work on the book. The Fiji Indian restaurant/pub, Aanvi’s, was a favourite spot for us to perform our writing task. It was based in a private house just off the main street in Nadi town-centre. The manager would serve you beer through a serving flap in the side wall of the house and we would sit at a picnic-style table in the side garden.
We decided to begin at the first session by Dyer giving me his childhood story, commencing from sandalwood traders, the Dyer family from Yorkshire, arriving in the islands and marrying into a local family, up until Dyer’s senior debuts with Airport Soccer Club and the Nadi Soccer Association. We then went through major domestic and international games during Dyer’s career and then to the postretirement period where he was more cynical and depressed about key events and his overall situation. There were 20 sessions of around 3 hours each so altogether I had access to about 60 hours of interview data. I typed them up, one-by-one, and then Dyer would visit the university and read through my writing and suggest and sometimes mandate corrections. During the interviews I got him to spell out player and place names. We could call the interviews unstructured veering towards semi-structured as I largely let Dyer talk and I only asked questions to clarify either information or preferred wordings. As the weeks passed, our teamwork and co-ordination improved and our interview and interaction style became more fluent and spontaneous. With sensitive subject areas, we carefully agreed on wordings together. I would read the words back out to him until I secured his agreement.
My positionality is as a white European. I think I gained a deeper understanding of Fiji society after living and working full-time in Fiji over a three-year period than I would have had had I come on a series of short visits. Although I learned a lot from intensive interaction with Dyer and other Indigenous Fijians, and with Fiji Indians at my Hindu private university, the views expressed here are not intended to capture Indigenous or Fiji Indian views other than in the quotes provided. One dynamic is important: Fiji Indians in the postcolonial context seem to sometimes have anxiety about white foreigners forming alliances with part-Europeans or Indigenous Fijians, and this would be traceable to the British colonial decision to put Indigenous Fijians and Fiji Indians on paths of separate development. This issue had to be handled with tact and sensitivity and it was important not to demonstrate favouritism or to be perceived that way.
Through Dyer, I was introduced to his long-term friend, mentor, and supporter, Mr Bobby Tikaram, a former Airport Soccer Club (ASC) president and Nadi Soccer Association administrator. Dyer and I did a joint-interview with Tikaram in Nadi on 14 August 2014. Dyer and Tikaram recalled Dyer scoring a goal on debut in the ASC’s 2-0 win over Blues Soccer Club at Nadi Sangam School in 1981. So, my first meeting with Dyer was unplanned and Dyer introduced me to the former Nadi president rather than the other way around. Hence, this was not a conventional research project where the researcher contacts a leading sports administrator and the project begins from there. By contrast, it began with a chance meeting and I first heard the rebel view of Dyer rather than the official view of current serving administrators. This is probably both a strength and a weakness of the research. Readers will need to bear in mind that we do not have here an officially-approved history, but more an alternative history or subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1980: pp. 81-83) where a retired ex-star, who is now estranged from formal roles within the sport, lays his soul bare.
Beginning 2 June 2015, we went together to Ba to interview ex-Ba players one-by-one. The first interview was with Ba and Fiji defender, Meli Vuilabasa. The second interview was with Ba and Fiji striker, Inia “Golden Boot” Bola (see Figure 1). The third interview was with the former Ba and Fiji midfielder Semi Tabaiwalu who had also served as head coach for the Ba Football Association team (see Figure 2). This interview process took from June to November 2015 and we interviewed five ex-Ba players in total, four of whom played in the classic 1982 IDC Final between Ba and Nadi. We interviewed four Indigenous players and one Fiji Indian player so as to get a variety of perspectives. We also interviewed two ex-Nadi players. Latina feminist Esther Madriz (2000: p. 836) recommends focus groups over individual interviews because they allow for group solidarity and empowerment to emerge and the group interaction can be informative to the researcher. We used group interviews to interview the other players with Dyer and I interviewing in tandem. Table A1 of Appendix lists all interviewees and interview dates.
For the Ba interviews, we visited Ba on quiet weekday afternoons by public minibus. On arriving in Ba, we would ask locals in the street or at the bus stand how to find certain ex-players. As Ba’s team of the 1970s and 1980s is still legendary in Ba and the passion for soccer is very high, even by global standards, we were able to receive satisfactory directions to players’ houses. We would visit an ex-player, exchange phone numbers, and agree on a time and day to return for the actual interview. On the interview day, we would bring beer and wine as a token of appreciation. Dyer would start the interview off and be the main interviewer for the first half of the interview because he had preexisting rapport with the ex-players and knew all the names of teammates and opponents from the era.
Figure 1. DSCF 8437, Left to right Henry Dyer, Inia Bola, wife and granddaughter of Inia, Ba, 17 June 2015.
Figure 2. DSCF8391, Henry Dyer (left) and Semi Tabaiwalu, Ba, 17 June 2015.
I would write down answers and interaction in a notebook. Interviews were not audio-recorded as I was concerned that audio-recording would lead to ex-players being more guarded in their responses. Interviews lasted about 3 hours each and took place either at the players’ homes or front verandas, Ba rugby ground, or Ba River foreshore. On two occasions, the ex-player’s wife participated fully in the interviews (and on another occasion was present but silent) and we agreed to this. I recorded the words spoken by all participants, including the ex-players’ wives. Snowball sampling (Sparkes & Smith, 2014: pp. 71-72) occurred where, when one ex-Ba player was satisfied with the interview process, he then shared his experience with other ex-players and recommend that they participate. Overall, we interviewed six ex-players, including Dyer, who played in the 1982 IDC Final, the most famous domestic match of the 1980s, which is 27% (6/22) of the total. We view this as a reasonable result given that some players have died while others have emigrated.
Participant-observation was a very important, if not crucial, component of the data collection process. I spent countless hours with Dyer socializing and drinking at his house in Nakavu Village (Nadi), Nadi town-centre, Ba town-centre, and Lautoka city-centre. I also had many unrecorded conversations with Dyer’s family members, friends, fellow villagers, and various ex-players, ex-managers, and ex-officials, including the late Ba president, Mr Vinod Patel, and the late Lautoka manager Roblin Autar (Fijilive, 2024). My connection with Dyer allowed me access to Indigenous Fijian village culture and especially gave me a window into the lives, attitudes, viewpoints, perspectives, and emotions of that particular generation of ex-players, then aged fifties and sixties. I attended the veterans’ dinner organized by the FFA in Nadi town-centre in October 2014, timed to coincide with that year’s IDC, and the manager’s half-time address at the 2014 BOG final between Lautoka and Rewa held in Suva.
I left Fiji in December 2015, but returned for short trips in July 2017 and July-August 2019, when I caught up with Dyer and his eldest son, Anare, and obtained updates from them on events in the Fiji soccer scene and around town. I felt a sense of sadness and loss at returning to my place of fieldwork as I was no longer a resident or fulltime employee in Fiji, but just another tourist. I felt, too, that I had abandoned my friends and former research participants.
4. Theory Framework: Everyday Resistance
Scott (1985) in Weapons of the weak, an anthropological study of a village in rural Kedah, Malaysia, highlighted how peasant resistance should not be viewed only in terms of the revolution model, where, in the Leninist sense, revolutionary thought and action is imposed from the outside and only successful revolutions make it into history books. He argues that most peasant resistance in history has not followed this form because the dangers of doing so are too great (34, 35). Instead, it is the small, everyday acts of noncooperation and rebellion, such as foot-dragging, damage to equipment, arson, theft, gossip, slander, regardless of whether intention can be proven or not, and regardless of consequences, that make up everyday resistance (29) and which can slowly drag regimes down. Scott defines resistance as “any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-à-vis those supeordinate classes” (290, emphasis original). In his concept of resistance, the presence of intention makes an act more likely to be resistance (290), but this feature is not decisive (290 - 291), as an undiscovered petty thief, for example, is unlikely to want to talk about her/his escapades (291). However, as we point out later, social expectations around memoir books can remove this aspect and bring actions and even intentions to light, albeit years after the fact when the danger is usually less. Consequences do not define resistance either, as we have all heard about the law of unintended consequences (295). Another key point, for Scott, is that, while a thirteenth century peasant may not be able to envisage an alternative mode of production, she/he can imagine a fairer world with a fairer distribution of benefits (331). This reminds us that we should not look down on peasant efforts as class-in-itself only and hence not a revolutionary class. Within a Marxist framework, mystification, for Scott (41), exists when a group assents to “the social ideology that justifies its exploitation”, whereas, if it “holds deviant or contradictory values”, we might be able to argue for the opposite of mystification.
5. Alcohol Consumption in Fiji
Puamau, Roberts, Schmich and Power (2011) report and summarize the results of two surveys about drug and alcohol use among youth in Fiji. A 1999 UNICEF survey found that alcohol was widely consumed, with two out of five (40.3%) of young people (13 - 15-years) having tasted it, compared to 32.3% for tobacco, 51.9% for kava, and 12.8% for marijuana. The percentage of current drinkers was 26% for men, but only 9% for women. Three out of five young people reported binge drinking of five or more alcohol drinks in one sitting. This is the type of drinking behaviour our ex-soccer players frequently engaged in during their playing days. By the time of a 2004 survey by National Substance Abuse Advisory Council (NSAAC) (sample size = 2147 secondary students), the percentages had risen dramatically to 43% for tobacco, 51% for alcohol, 61% for kava, and 13% for marijuana. The desire for “washdown” (beer drinking after a kava-drinking session) partly accounts for the alcohol consumption (Plange, 1991; Presterudstuen, 2020: p. 97; Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 169; Rokosawa, 1986; Toren, 1994: p. 160). While women drink alcohol in nightclub and social settings, they rarely participate in street- or public-drinking sessions not connected with a specific occasion (Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 166). Men are more likely to binge drink at these sessions. These authors (Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 168) suggest that, at least back then, obtaining alcohol from shops was not hard for minors, and so drinking at an early age was facilitated, and drinking habits developed early on (see also Adinkrah, 1995).
Anecdotal evidence in Fiji suggests that excessive alcohol use is linked to motor vehicle accident rates, violence and aggressive behaviour, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, and criminal activities (Abusah, 1991: pp. 21-25; Kippax, 1986: pp. 24-28; Naiveli, 1986: pp. 34-35; Plange, 1991; Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 169; World Health Organization, 2004). One motive for youth drinking is to “manage their problems” (Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 169), but other problems may emerge such as unsafe sex, crime and violence, and occasionally suicide (Casswell, 1986: p. 25; Kippax, 1986; Naiveli, 1986: pp. 34-35; Rokosawa, 1986). Alcohol was a contributor to 58% of all homicides from 1982-92 (Adinkrah, 1995, 1996); and approximately 80% of crime in the island nation is purported to be alcohol-related (Adinkrah, 1996; Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 169; World Health Organization, 2004). Heavy alcohol use is associated with diabetes, heart problems, obesity, and hypertension (Adinkrah, 1995, 1996; Casswell, 1986; Gounder, 2006; Moulds & Malani, 2003; Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 170). Social consequences include, but are not limited to, violent crime, domestic violence, and road fatalities (Adinkrah, 2003; Puamau, Roberts, Schmich, & Power, 2011: p. 170; Ratinisiva, 1991).
Jones (2009) studied alcohol use among Indigenous Fijians via ethnographic fieldwork at Qauia Village, near Lami, and at Suva nightclubs. His findings are paradoxical and contradictory, but nonetheless accurate, in that he found that beer-drinking sessions mirrored and replicated the formality and ritual of kava-drinking. For example, the usual longneck bottle of beer was served (“taki”), via one small glass (bilo), to one person after another, in a circle, with the most senior man usually being served first. On occasion, the glass would be passed around rather than always being returned to the server, and the exact order of drinking would depend on spatial considerations. However, beer-drinking also allowed people to break the extreme rigidity and formality of the kava ritual since beer-drinking was associated with modernity and capitalism, the “town” rather than the “village” (spatially and sociologically). Beer-drinking remained largely communal and homosocial, as with kava-drinking, but it opened up new space for economic capital to take on symbolic capital because the person paying for the beer was usually served first or second (Toren, 1994: p. 161). Therefore, a financially better-off person could claim temporary higher status via purchasing beer for the group, but this was never possible with kava-drinking where traditional hierarchies were promulgated and reinforced through practice. More unruly and antisocial masculine practices were associated with or pardoned by alcohol consumption especially in Suva’s Indigenous Fijian nightclubs remote from village control. This is due to the physiological effects of alcohol plus people changing their behaviour separately of these effects, but using these effects as a cover for or as a justification for more unrestrained conduct, such as fighting, arguments about personal or family issues, and pursuit of women, which are key parts of hegemonic masculinity within these settings.
6. 1983 South Pacific Games, Apia, Samoa
The first of our two minicases concerns events at the 1983 South Pacific Games (SPG) at Apia, Samoa, and was told to me by Dyer on 14 May 2014. The story has been published in full in Dyer and James (2023: pp. 49-57). The Fiji team had been successful in the tournament, beating Solomon Islands 10-0 and Vanuatu 6-0 (Prasad, 2008: p. 95), before outperforming New Caledonia 3-2 in one of the two semi-finals (Prasad, 2013: p. 43). This was one of the strongest teams ever to represent the island nation internationally. The events recounted by Henry Dyer took place one evening before the semi-final. The players were permitted to leave camp, but had to be back in camp before 8:00 pm. Senior players Josiah “Joe” Tubuna, Upendra Choy, and Semi Tabaiwalu, went out with the junior player, Henry Dyer, then aged 21-years-old. They enjoyed the drinking and the time vanished before their eyes. They arrived back at camp at 10:00 pm.
Police Inspector and team manager, Jahir Khan, had slept with his body blocking the door of the accommodation building so he would be alerted when the curfew-breakers tried to sneak back into camp. The players called out for teammate Mohammed Salim to open the door. Jahir Khan asked: “Were you looking for Salim? Salim is waiting for you”. They were then asked: “Where have you been?” After that, they were told to go to bed and wake up in the morning to breakfast with the others.
In the morning, the German coach of the Fiji national team, the late Rudi Gutendorf (1926-2019) told the players to go for a run to sweat off the alcohol. They got their discipline, but their face and self-respect were saved because the coach did not inform the media or players from other countries. Dyer admits that Gutendorf’s approach was culturally-suitable for his Indigenous Fijian players. Here, as he recounted the story, Dyer came across more as the unrepentant naughty schoolboy whereas in the Labasa case (coming next) he came across as chastened and sorrowful. Possibly, the remote location of Samoa gave a further feeling of being far away from home and unaccountable. The sight of bare-chested Samoans walking around town and landowners drinking by the side of the road made a deep impression and encouraged a more ill-disciplined approach. Possibly, there was an element where the players used this occasion as a tool of resistance, but also to create a long-lasting memory that they would be able to recall at will in later years when they got together to socialize in the villages.
One participant in Sebeelo’s (2023) study of the effect of the COVID 19-related alcohol ban in Botswana ideologically disagreed with the ban and sought out ways to defy and circumvent it. This person made bootleg liquor for sale, hence for him alcohol was used as a tool of resistance while he presumably sympathized with those who were deprived of alcohol due to the ban. He became a type of leader of these rebels during the strange conditions of lockdown.
There may well be a race/class dimension as the Fiji Indian team management had access to a higher standard of living and lifestyle opportunities than most of the poorer Indigenous players (and working-class Fiji Indians such as the Sami brothers from Ba, Julie and Vimal). To illustrate this, Jahir Khan was the brother of the late Fiji Indian Muslim lawyer, Shah Nawaz Khan, who, around 1988, was the manager of the Lautoka team in the Fiji Premier League (Dyer & James, 2023: p. 42). In fact, there had been seven lawyers serving as FFA president as at 2008 (Prasad, 2008: p. 17). Therefore, there may have been a desire among the ex-players to take such drinking opportunities when they became available since there must have been the realization that overseas travel would not be accessible to them once their playing careers were over. There would have been, as I believe Dyer tried to communicate to me, a slight resentment mixed with wistfulness and melancholy about their situation. The gap in wealth and lifestyle opportunities must have loomed large in the players’ consciousness and the enjoyment of the occasion must have been seized upon as an opportunity too good to pass up.
The players may have been overconfident based on their on-field successes in the tournament, up to that point, and been convinced that their on-field performance would be able to remain at a high level. They put their confidence in the cohesion demonstrated among the players forged through Indigenous Fijian links in Western Fiji (where most of the players hailed from during that era) that were strong because of both village and soccer connections.
In the end, the strong Tahiti team won the final 1-0, and a riot at a refereeing decision led to Jahir Khan having to draw upon his police inspector credentials and influence to negotiate a pathway for his Fijian players to escape the country minus any legal repercussions.
The Samoan events may reflect an insurgent Indigenous masculinity (Tengan, 2002: p. 239, 247; Uperesa, 2021: p. 518) being asserted by the players at both the extended drinking session and the riot. With very few Fiji Indians existing in Oceania outside of Fiji, there may have been a new perception among the players that their Indigenous masculinity was ascendant in Samoa while Fiji Indian masculinity was weaker. Perceiving a shift in relative masculinities may have emboldened the Fiji players. Despite this, we should note Tengan’s (2002: p. 240) comment to be wary of “any simple categorization” of masculinities as “either ‘Western’ or ‘Polynesian’”.
A contrary image to the “hypermasculinity” (Tengan, 2002: p. 239) or “(hyper)masculinity” (Uperesa, 2021: p. 518) on display here is the encouragement that the Fiji men’s soccer team offered to the women’s teams, and vice-versa, as Dyer also noted. In that situation, ethnic solidarity coexisted with male solidarity and interacted with it in various ways.
7. Labasa-Versus-Nadi away in Labasa (Fiji Domestic Soccer)
The second minicase to be presented here dates back to the late 1980s or early 1990s, and was told to me by Dyer on 19 September 2014. The story has been published in full in Dyer and James (2023: pp. 81-86). The story involves the Nadi (pronounced “Nandi”, similar to “Nando’s”) district or association team in the Fiji Premier League travelling by airplane to Fiji’s second island, Vanua Levu, to play Labasa (pronounced “Lambasa”). In those days of poorer communications, the local fans in Labasa, Vanua Levu’s biggest town (population now 28,500) were very excited to see Nadi’s host of domestic and international stars in the flesh. For their part, the Nadi players were excited to be travelling by airplane to a place outside the main island, Viti Levu.
On arrival in Labasa, the Labasa fans wanted to buy beers for and drink with the Nadi players in the town-centre on the night before the game. The Nadi management allowed the fans to buy beers for the players, but the drinking session was to be held outside the team camp. The fans genuinely wanted to show the players a warm welcome, but they also hoped that the drinking would adversely affect the Nadi players’ on-field performance during the game.
As Dyer tells the story, the players woke up with major hangovers, and self-doubt and anxiety began to assail them and become the dominant emotion. As they warmed up at Labasa’s Subrail Park, Wadi Tom, a senior Indigenous Nadi man, who happened to be at the game by chance, asked if he might be able to address the players. Wadi Tom was a former Nadi rugby player and the father of the Nadi soccer player, the late Inosi Tora. He addressed the team and he was probably aware of the players’ hangover state. He reminded the players that they were representing Nadi, their families, and their villages. He told them that even if they were Fiji Indian or from other provinces, they were still Nadi representatives. Wadi Tom made a deep impression on the Nadi players, due to his sincerity and forthrightness, and his high social and cultural capital. This social and cultural capital existed in the players’ minds because he was a senior Indigenous Nadi man, and this factor, combined with his Nadi rugby background, ensured that his spoken words struck a chord. His speaking in the Nadi dialect also proved decisive. The Nadi players managed to score and the Labasa team was surprised that they appeared to have recovered from the drinking. The Labasa players had been informed by their hardcore fans about the escapades of the previous night. When Nadi won 1-0, the Labasa fans accompanied the Nadi players back to the airport, complaining “We bought beers for you, and you beat us. How can this work?” The Nadi players replied: “No, this is what you want”.
Nadi won the league title through winning the game. Essentially, it was the gap in talent, combined with Wadi Tom’s inspiring speech, that was unexpected and probably contained within it an element of rebuke, that proved to be the difference between the two teams.
The Fiji Indian coach of Nadi, Mani Naicker, was so shocked and dismayed that, on the night before the game, he told the team that he was leaving and that it was up to them to redeem the situation. There was clearly a gap in methods and worldview between Naicker, who expected and wanted a professional approach, and the Nadi players, who wanted to drink with the fans and enjoy the excitement of the trip by airplane to Labasa.
Wadi Tom’s reference to “Indians” is significant as it represents a statesmanlike and magnanimous recognition that he and they are in a public realm context, outside of the realm of the semipublic realm of the village. But his very act of speaking produced and contained an opposite message, it reaffirmed and mobilized Indigenous moral legitimacy as he took the burden upon himself to fill the breach and act like the statesman in a situation that was regarded as untoward. He reaffirmed both public and private and took on himself the role of statesman in a situation when no-one else had the moral legitimacy to take it on. “You can be a Fiji Indian and still be a guest” might be a partial translation of the message, and, if so, then the utterance also reaffirmed the unreferenced fact of Indigenous moral landownership.
It is possible to see this event as the use of alcohol as a tool of resistance, although it is not obvious that this was anyone’s intention, but as Scott (1985) makes clear it is a complicated business to prove intentions if they are not clearly stated. The point about the moral legitimacy of Wadi Tom that legitimized his utterance relies on a notion of the ultimate ethical and moral purity and authority of Indigenous moral landownership based on the Vuda Point landing. This point and then this brave act of utterance can be said both to rebuke the drunken players and proclaim Indigenous moral authority. As Fiji Indians control the team management and the Association management and would have made up the bulk of spectators, his utterance can be seen as a form of symbolic resistance against the racial/class-based hierarchies within the sport.
Judging by Dyer’s facial expressions and tone of voice as he told the story, he regrets the events of the trip, declares them to have been unprofessional, and he admits that they should never have happened. He never disputes Wadi Tom’s intervention or his authority.
The different attitude displayed by Dyer in the SPG case may be influenced by the feeling that (unlike in rugby) no-one was a Fiji fan first and foremost, and that people back home would understand the temptations to enjoy themselves that the Fiji players faced in Apia. Upsetting the Nadi fans in the Labasa case loomed larger as a much more real and immediate prospect than upsetting the Fiji fans through the events at the SPG (that were not revealed to the public at the time anyway). Nadi had fewer than 42,000 residents at that time and the players either lived in the town or in the Indigenous villages. Therefore, recompense for a poor and losing performance would have been direct and possibly harsh as it might well have come from friends, fellow villagers, and work colleagues. It could also have been that the atmosphere in Labasa had a party side to it, but much less so than the situation in Samoa, due to Vanua Levu still being within Fiji, and so everyday responsibilities and constraints would have been harder to totally dispel. And, in my interviews with Dyer, we discussed the SPG case in the second or third interview session (14 May 2014), when our relation was less developed, and he may have been keen to present a loveable rogue image to me. The Labasa match story was communicated to me in full on 19 September 2014, so a good four months later. As the research project continued on, he may have begun to feel, and this is the impression that I got at the time, more responsibility towards the present and future readers of his account. The image he wanted to present was of a mature and reflective person who was socially-responsible.
8. Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Fiji Soccer
One sunny afternoon in Western Fiji’s small and short “winter” (20 June 2015), Nadi and Fiji icon, Henry Dyer, and I interviewed ex-Ba player Semi Tabaiwalu. We started off at the Ba River foreshore, a place for lengthy drinking celebration parties after each of Ba’s IDC title wins in the 1970s, and then progressed as it got colder and the wind picked up to Ba Central Club. This club was a Fiji Indian and Ba Football Association bastion where Rajesh Patel and his associates could sometimes be seen drinking in the 2010s. Tabaiwalu was still upset from his days as manager (head coach in the Australian parlance) of the Ba team in the Fiji Premier League from 2007-10 when he had won for the team each of the four available trophies at least once. His contract was not renewed by the administrators, he believes, because he was too outspoken and we can link this to use of Fiji Indian cultural hegemony to control the activities, behaviours, and demeanours of people in the sport. He sees this not necessarily in terms of racism in the Garcian (Garcia, 2001) sense of ill-will or disregard but as the application of Fiji Indian cultural control upon an outsider.
In Fiji, there is a cultural practice, based on and mirroring the much more formal kava ritual, where if I pour beer into your glass and you drink it in one gulp that act signifies reconciliation and solidarity. Dyer poured beer from a Fiji Gold longneck bottle that afternoon, 20 June 2015, into the glass held by the Fiji Indian barman. The onlookers smiled and cheered as he took the drink and drank it and this was recorded in a photograph. Dyer’s and my goal was for Tabaiwalu to not feel ashamed and to be able to hold his head up high again in that Ba Football Association-connected establishment, thus allowing him to regain some self-respect and dignity. Now aged 72, his coaching days are behind him, but he is active in Fiji-related Facebook groups and is still a regular church attendee. He sees his faith as providing a grounding and legitimation for the outspokenness which he demonstrated as a manager. The following discussion at our interview is illuminating:
Semi Tabaiwalu: From 2007-2010 (four years) I was coach of Ba team and I scooped all the titles. [Note by researcher: Ba won the Fiji FACT in 2007 and 2010, BOG each year from 2007-2009, IDC in 2007, and the national-league title in 2008 and 2010.]
Henry Dyer: So that would have been one of your best soccer achievements in management.
Henry: Why did you pull out of Ba Soccer as a coach?
Semi: Because of the management.
Henry: Did they drop you as a coach?
Semi: Yes, they said my term is over. I knew already because every time I go against them I always talk straight to them about how things should go.
Researcher: What is your comment about the fact that Indigenous Fijian players seem to find it harder to become coaches and officials than Fiji Indian players do?
Semi: Because us [Indigenous] Fijian boys we are very good at heart. We work straight, we talk straight; we don’t know all these things about the economic and monetary side of playing dirty. This always enabled the Indians to run the show and we let them run the show. A good example is about our former friend and player George Koi. He was the first Fijian (apart from the Indians) to become a vice-president of Fiji Football. This may have been in the late 1990s to the 2000s, I cannot remember exactly. In his first year he started to find about how Fiji Football was working. He found out certain detailed facts about the Association and they were worried about this guy. He was removed after three months in office [interview, 20 June 2015, emphasis added].
A further discussion of race, ethnicity, and class occurred at my interview session with Dyer when he talks about the sad demise of Sweats Soccer Club (Sweats SC). Sweats SC was coached by three ex-Nadi Soccer Association stars and the president was the now deceased village headman. It was a village-based (Indigenous) club, as opposed to the Fiji Indian-backed clubs that revolve around or identify with a particular specific town, district, school, or religious organization. The club entered the Nadi club competition and, in a few years, was promoted to the top division of club teams. However, Sheik Rental Cars, the main sponsor, pulled out and the club ended up folding.
Dyer believes that the Fiji Indian administrators at Nadi Soccer Association were keen to see the club die because it was becoming “too good for the other clubs” (Henry Dyer, personal interview, 2014, Nadi, Ba Province, notes in possession of author). A further implication is that they did not value Indigenous-controlled or Indigenous-backed clubs. Dyer mentions that some assistance should have been given to Sweats SC, such as an amnesty on registration fees or just advice and moral support. Instead, he blames the leadership of the Association for willfully allowing the club to die. He noted that, as at 2015, there were no village-based teams left in the Nadi club competition after the demise of Sweats SC and Tanoa SC. As Dyer explains the situation, speaking in 2014:
In the sense of sporting fair play Nadi Soccer Association also did not do much to help. If they were really happy about the [Indigenous] Fijian guys forming a club they would have come to see us and worked out ways to help. They waited for us to drown. They did not offer us a hand to escape the deep water. They possibly thought that we were too good for the other clubs and so they began to work for the other clubs. The other village-based club Tanoa had nose-dived too. There are many soccer clubs in Nadi which died for financial reasons including Airport, Union, Young Ones, and a few others. Nadi Soccer Association did not have the insight to give them amnesty periods of two years of no fee payments to keep these clubs alive nor did they give the clubs advice about what they should do. It’s a pity that there have been no village-based teams in the competition from that time up until today. We are trying our best to resurrect a Fijian-based soccer club. This is where the strength of the sport of soccer is [interview, 19 June and 10 July 2014, Nadi, Ba Province, notes in possession of author].
Dyer draws out the implications of this event for Fiji soccer administration:
I believe that financial backing from a corporate body would lift the morale of any village club and be the backbone of the club. It’s not that we were greedy or wanting to take over the Association. It is just that soccer management should be acting in the best interests of the sport instead of serving and protecting vested interests. I believe that is one of the reasons why Fiji soccer has nosedived from the time we were playing until today. Imagine that Fiji was beating Solomons 10-0 in 1983 but now our top clubs cannot beat Vanuatu’s clubs in the Oceania Champions League [interview, 19 June and 10 July 2014].
Our Fiji Indian interviewee, Julie Sami, older brother of Vimal, concurred with the observation of his Indigenous Fijian teammates when he said that he deplored the “racial feeling in the game now”. In Sami’s words:
Researcher: Why do you think [Indigenous] Fijian players are not coaching the districts today?
Julie Sami: The [Indigenous] Fijian boys don’t get to go the coaching clinics because it is not advertised on the TV or in the papers; they only tell their friends; only a handful of people know about it. There is a racial feeling in the game now; it is not good for the sport. I want to go coaching too but they never tell us; it is not in the papers or on the radio [interview, 1 October 2015, Ba, Ba Province, notes in possession of author].
Sami grew up alongside Indigenous people in the Ba hinterland and worked side-by-side with them at Fiji Sugar Corporation (FSC) in Ba. He had a dream that something bad had happened on the night that Joe Tubuna died and he told his foreman at FSC the next morning before he heard about the tragedy (source: Julie Sami, personal interview, 1 October 2015, Ba, Ba Province, notes in possession of author). Sami was one of the working-class Fiji Indians who perceived social class similarities between the Indigenous players and himself. By contrast, those players from business house families, such as Farouk Janeman and Vimlesh Singh, tended to separate themselves, to some extent, from their Indigenous teammates (source: Henry Dyer, at interview with Julie Sami, 1 October 2015).
All of these quotes suggest that there could have been some resentment held by the Indigenous Fijian players towards the Fiji Indian administrations, or at least feelings of alienation and estrangement, due to frustration at perceived Fiji Indian control. Then the concept of everyday resistance comes into play as a prism through which we can view certain actions.
It is worth mentioning Pigliasco (2010) here as a kind of counterexample. He describes how the traditional firewalking of Beqa Island has avoided alienation processes by being still controlled by the tribe itself, as a result of cultural “branding” and continued performances. By contrast, Fiji Indian firewalking displays have never taken off to the same extent (173). This case is obviously very different from the case of soccer where, as one Fiji Indian Lautoka lawyer once said, the sport uses up the elite talent and then throws it away like a teabag.
9. Postretirement Blues and the Right to Speak
There is a certain perception among the ex-players that their soccer achievements, in an era when Fiji was relatively strong by historic standards, and their present sufferings give them an existential authenticity and right to speak on a range of issues not only restricted to soccer. These issues might even extend to social and political issues such as race/ethnicity, living standards, and equal opportunities. They would not see themselves as or want to be formal politicians but they think that their experiences give them the right to speak. Dyer has scolded Fiji Indian taxi drivers in Lautoka who only stop to pick us up at night because I (the white foreigner) stand at the side of the road while he hides in the shadows, about their racism. They accept the rebukes meekly due to his soccer icon status and forthright and self-confident manner. He also actively looks out for the wellbeing of younger people in the community and here his ex-soccer star status and current assistant village headman status work together to give him a kind of legitimate authority. He helps his village raise funds by visiting Nadi businesses where his soccer star status allows him to secure far higher donations than other villagers. But he is an unknown among younger people including soccer fans aged under 40 and he is ignored by the mainstream media who are only interested in today’s players and a select handful of approved, politically-correct ex-stars. He is heavily involved in the player self-help organization, Nadi Legends Football Club, established 2004. This organization was formed by ex-players and officials and had and has no official connection to Nadi Soccer Association.
Semi: You know you Nadi guys have a lot of power from the ancestral gods. But don’t put it.
Henry: Yes, put it, James, this is the truth; the real life.
10. Conclusion
As Geertz (1972: p. 26) wrote about the Balinese cockfighters in his classic anthropological essay, these stories here are stories that the ex-players tell themselves about themselves. We conclude that alcohol was used by the ex-players in the SPG case as a tool of everyday resistance to the regimental control of bodies implemented by the Fiji Indian team management and the German coach of the Fiji national team. They may have held mild resentment towards these people due to their higher perceived wealth and lifestyle opportunities. The ex-players knew that, after their soccer careers were over, they would return to the lifestyle of subsistence farmers in the Indigenous villages and the prospects for overseas travel would be small or nonexistent. Hence, they wanted to extend drinking past the curfew so that they would have collective memories to draw upon when they met back in Fiji socially postretirement. They may have perceived a shift in relative masculinities being in Samoa, where they observed Indigenous Samoans walking around bare-chested, and this may have impressed them as a sign of unrepentant Indigenous masculinity. By contrast, there are very few Fiji Indians in Oceania, once you leave the Fiji Islands, so the players may have perceived relative masculinities shifting in their favour.
We have presented interview quotes about the topic of Fiji Indian control of soccer, and the various specific ramifications that have flowed from that, such as Semi Tabaiwalu’s management position at Ba Football Association not being renewed at the end of his contract. However, we have very little data from interviews about the use of alcohol per se. Instead, I (first author) draw my conclusions here based on my knowledge of the ex-players involved that was achieved through two years of sustained participant-observation and countless conversations with Dyer, in particular, but also with Tabaiwalu and others. Where there is shared ethnicity and kinship, such as the ex-players’ views on Indigenous Fijians who have made money from playing rugby, resentment would be the wrong word, I would prefer to use the words wistfulness and melancholy instead. They realize that they were in the wrong era if they wanted to make substantial money out of sport (Besnier & Brownell, 2012: p. 452) and probably in the wrong sport too. In the Labasa case, alcohol was used by the Labasa fans as a tool of tribute and a tool of temptation. If player resistance was involved, it is not clear that this was anyone’s intention.
I perceive, from my interviews, numerous conversations, and participant-observation, over the 2014-19 period, that the Methodist/Christian idea of redemption, while in no way being rejected, is seen by ex-players as not being quite the full story. As Nietzsche thought that the narrative form, where everything is tied up and explained at the end, can be associated with both redemption and the resentment (ressentiment) of slave morality (Strong, 1996: p. 136), the ex-players seem to communicate, and sometimes literally articulate, the idea that their struggles and achievements in a golden era of Fiji soccer, combined with their post-career sufferings, offer an existential, ironic element of will to truth. This is seen as a kind of ethical perspective. But, verbally at least, the Methodist message is never rejected, it is just felt to be slightly incomplete if their suffering is excluded from the picture. In other words, the comfortable cannot possibly understand. Nonetheless, Methodism is seen as an integral part of Indigeneity, which sets the Indigenous Fijians apart, in their own thinking, from the non-Indigenous peoples.
Appendix
Table A1. List of interviewees and the matches in which they played.
No. |
Name |
Team |
Interview
date |
1982 IDC Final |
1985 v
Newcastle United |
1988 v
Australia |
1 |
Raymond Fong |
Nadi MDa |
24-07-2014 |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
2 |
Bobby Tikaram |
Nadi VPb |
14-08-2014 |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
3 |
Henry Dyer |
Nadi & Fijic |
Various |
√ |
√ |
× |
4 |
Meli Vuilabasa |
Ba & Fiji |
02-06-2015 |
√ |
√ |
√ |
5 |
Inia Bola |
Ba & Fiji |
17-06-2015 |
√ |
× |
× |
6 |
Semi Tabaiwalu |
Ba & Fiji |
20-06-2015 |
√ |
× |
× |
7 |
Savenaca Waqa |
Nadi & Fiji |
27-08-2015 |
√ |
√ |
× |
8 |
Julie Sami |
Ba & Fiji |
01-10-2015 |
√ |
× |
× |
9 |
Lote Delai |
Ba & Fijid |
15-10-2015 |
× |
× |
√ |
10 |
Pravin Sharma |
FGWUd |
15-10-2015 |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
aDr Raymond Fong was Nadi Soccer Association’s official medical doctor in 1982. As at 2015, he was working as a general practitioner on Ashram Road, Nadi town-centre. bMr Bobby Tikaram was Nadi Soccer Association vice-president in 1982 under the leadership of the then president, the late Mr Sri V. Chetty. As at 2014-15, Tikaram was retired from the workforce and lived near Nadi. cHenry Dyer played for Lautoka Blues in the mid-1980s in between his two stints with Nadi. He was raised in Lautoka and attended Drasa Avenue School and Ba Provincial Secondary School. His first senior club game was for Bobby Tikaram’s Airport Soccer Club in the Nadi Association against Blues Soccer Club in 1981. In 2014-15 Dyer was serving as assistant headman and village council member at Nakavu Village, Nadi. dMr Pravin Sharma was the president of the Fiji General Workers’ Union (FGWU) as at October 2015; Lote Delai worked for Fiji Sugar Corporation (FSC) (Ba) and hence was then represented by Sharma in regards to workplace issues. The views of Sharma and Delai expressed at our interview do not necessarily represent the views of FSC or FGWU.