MICHAEL MORRIS | A free society produces a rich diversity of cultures and traditions - Business Day

Michael Morris

I was looking for something quite different in my labyrinthine and somewhat ramshackle digital archive last week when I came across a Cape Argus news report of late December 1911 informing readers with an entirely straight face that “the natives of the Fiji Islands have become less fastidious in their tastes, and have taken to eating tinned salmon in place of the white man”.

The source of this recondite insight into the encouraging vagaries of the Fijian diet was Thomas Clayton Twitchell, the first Bishop of Polynesia, himself a resident of Fiji, and at that distant moment guest speaker at the wonderfully named Manchester Free Trade Hall.

The bishop’s bluff account of just how much nicer life on Fiji had become (“travellers … could now live in an open house in the wildest parts of the islands with far greater security than one could live in an open house in London”) accompanied a warning on the metropole’s corrupting role in the far-flung reaches of its influence, placing Fijians at risk of “extinction”.

Instead of being kept fit by incessant warring, the islander now “owns the surplus lands of the colony, the rents of which are collected by the British government and handed over to him in large sums half-yearly”.

Tinned salmon, white man, extinction, surplus lands of the colony ― there’s a lot to chew on here. Though, in case we get carried away, modest research last week yielded the leavening 1876 insight of long-time chief medical officer of British colonial Fiji, William McGregor, that the rare instances of tasting the flesh of an enemy was done “to indicate supreme hatred and not out of relish for a gastronomic treat”.

I might not have bothered thinking much about that preposterous 1911 headline, Cannibals Becoming Less Fastidious, were it not for an unignorably challenging reflection ― on home soil, not to put too fine a point on it ― on all that makes us who we are, and why it matters.

In his Heritage Day celebration of freedom in the making of cultural complexity, the founder and CEO of the Izwe Lami Freedom Foundation, Leon Louw, attaches to the uncomplicated truth that “[e]very person belongs to cross-cutting cultures, classes or groups”, this tantalising image of unbridled humanity: “One might, for instance, be Muslim, vegetarian, Zulu, entrepreneur, smoker, feminist and illiterate.”

“A free society,” Louw writes, “is one in which human interaction spontaneously produces a rich diversity of cultures and traditions. These become built into the fabric of almost every aspect of life: language, common law, religion, values, lifestyles, morals, history, rituals, skills, dress codes, manners, art, trade and even soccer or how children are raised or how food is prepared. Cultures generally overlap and enrich each other. Occasionally they breed hatred, even genocide.”

Innovations that delivered tinned fish to Fiji (however dubious the claims of its impact) are ultimately inextricable from larger processes, the convergence of human interests, the erosion of superstition (as much among colonials as the “savages” it thrilled them to misdescribe, subdue, and “civilise”), and the way we see what is meaningful.

For all the seeming allure of clannish solidarity, the shabby promise of safety and prosperity in the purity of ethnic isolationism rests on a delusion that history and culture can be made to stand still to let the discomforted seek their destiny in the wastes of nostalgia.

I can do no better than end where Louw begins: “Heritage Day and Heritage Month are celebrations of more than just culture; they are celebrations of freedom.”

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-09-28-michael-morris-colonial-echoes-linger-in-fijis-tinned-salmon-tale/