Kaunitoni myth

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The Kaunitoni Myth is a Fijian myth about the settlement of the Fiji Islands, named after the legendary Kaunitoni boat .

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According to myth, the ancestors of the Fijians come from Thebes in Egypt . They drove up the Nile and reached Lake Tanganyika , where they settled. They caused conflicts with neighboring tribes in the 10th century BC. Under their chief Lutunasobasoba with a canoe called Kaunitoni to set sail eastwards towards the sun. On the way, a storm seizes them and they lose all their belongings, including the chief's stones with inscriptions. They strand on the northwest coast of Viti Levu , where they establish a first settlement, Vuda ( origin ). When Lutunasobasoba gets old, his brother Degei sets out to find higher settlements. He chooses the mountains in the northeast of the island (area of Rakiraki ). There a house for chief Lutunasobasoba is being built from the wood of the pandanus tree ( Fijian .: Na kau vadra), which gives the entire settlement the name: Nakauvadra . After Lutunasobasoba's death, the population was spread across Fiji.

A Fijian version is e.g. B. the song Koi ra na vuda ( Our ancestors ).

Emergence

Originally it was reported that in Fiji - unlike the Rotuma Islands , Samoa or New Zealand - there is no myth about the settlement of the island from outside the country. It was not until 1892 that Basil Thomson mentioned a legend, referring to a resident of Beqa Island , according to which the ancestors of the Fijians were washed up on the west coast of Viti Levu. That same year, the Fijian magazine Na Mata ran a competition to determine the definitive version of this myth; Thomson published this in English in 1895.

Perhaps there is indeed an old myth that has long been kept secret from strangers; possibly the Kaunitoni myth is also of more recent origin. For example, a graduate of the Mission School of Navuloa (1892–94) reports that teaching aids were used there that established links between Fiji and Tanzania on a linguistic basis . In addition, there were repeated inquiries from whites about the origins of the island's population, either out of pure research interests or for the purposes of property management (Native Lands Commission). The Kaunitoni myth could also be traced back to outside influence.

literature

  • Peter France: The Kaunitoni migration: notes on the genesis of a Fijian tradition. In: The Journal of Pacific History. Volume 1, 1966, pp. 107-113, JSTOR 25167866 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ fijibure.com
  2. ↑ Jennifer Cattermole: Fijian sigidrigi and the sonic representation and construction of place. In: Transforming Cultures eJournal. Volume 4, No. 1, April 2009, pp. 149-171, here p. 166.
  3. ^ Basil Thomson: The Land of our Origin - Viti, or Fiji. In: The Journal of the Polynesian Society . Volume 1, 1892, pp. 143-146.
  4. ^ Basil Thomson: The Kalou-Vu (Ancestor-Gods) of the Fijians. In: The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 24, 1895, pp. 340-359, here 344 f.
  5. ↑ Epeli Rokowaqa: Ai tukutuku kei Viti. 1926 [?]