meaning, agency and colonial history: Navosavakadua and theTukamovement in Fiji

make their history? Does this make their terms of agency already a reflection of colonial culture? Reconsidering an aspect of Fijian history previously studied as cargo cult, this study examines issues of meaning and agency, novelty and cultural continuity. In the late 1870s Christian missionaries had been in Fiji for almost 50 years. The islands had been ceded to Great Britain in 1874. Then, in the hinterlands of Viti Levu, Fiji's largest island, an oracle priest called Navosavakadua mobilized in opposition to enemies old and new. He foretold a world overturned, in which Fijian chiefs would serve the Fijian people and foreigners would be driven out. He foretold the return of ancestor gods and ancestors; he made miracles and granted immortality (tuka) to his followers. Revealing the return of two Fijian gods, the Twins, to the sacred Nakauvadra mountain range, he identified them as the true Jehovah and Jesus. Colonial authorities found his Tuka heathen and criminal; Navosavakadua and his followers were the subject of extensive colonial surveillance and were ultimately deported. Their present-day descendants, now returned to their ancestral lands, have little to say about Tuka but much to say about their ancestor. They assert that Navosavakadua served Jehovah and worshipped him before the missionaries came to Fiji. From the 1870s to the present, Navosavakadua has remained a potent legendary figure, renowned among his direct descendants in the north of Viti Levu island, his name known by Fijians throughout the Fiji group. He has remained potent in the concerns of the colonial and postcolonial state1 and in the Western scholarly imagination. Navosavakadua has been called a prophet, and Tuka has been read as a paradigmatic example of the cargo cult (Worsley 1968) or millenarian movement (Burridge 1969). Rather than proposing a new general theory of cults, however, I seek to dissolve the analytic construct How are we to understand the agency of others in colonial encounters? Analyses of indigenous history making and of colonial hegemony can be harmonized: in colonial societies multiple cultural articulations are formed, contested, and routinized. This essay reconsiders Navosavakadua, a 19th-century Fijian oracle priest, and his Tuka movement, once considered a paradigmatic cargo cult. Navosavakadua's project contested a developing colonial orthodoxy; both were articulations of Fijian ritual-politics, colonial authority, and the Christian god. Colonizers try to routinize articulations that privilege them, but others also make history with their own powers to articulate. [history, colonialism, agency, ritual-politics,