Title: Tales of the Tikongs Author: Epeli Hau'ofa Creation Date: 1983 Location: Suva, Fiji Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Epeli Hau'ofa published Tales of the Tikongs in 1983, while working in the intellectual world of the University of the South Pacific in Suva. Hau'ofa was born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan missionary parents in 1939, grew up across the Pacific, and became one of the defining thinkers of modern Pacific studies. His fiction is inseparable from his later essay "Our Sea of Islands", which rejected the idea of Pacific nations as tiny, isolated, dependent fragments and insisted instead on Oceania as a vast connected world.
The book is a sequence of comic stories set in Tiko, a fictional Pacific island nation close enough to Tonga, Fiji, and their neighbours to feel recognisable without being reducible to any one country. Its subject is development: not development as aspiration, but development as industry, with consultants, aid agencies, reports, pilot projects, metrics, workshops, and foreign experts arriving to improve people whose lives they do not understand.
The comedy is sharp because it is affectionate. The Tikongs are not idealised innocents. They are strategic, lazy, generous, ceremonial, clever, evasive, devout, social, infuriating, and often much better at reading the foreigners than the foreigners are at reading them. The joke repeatedly turns on scale: the expert believes the island is small, backward, and manageable; the island knows the expert is temporary. For Fiji, a hub of Pacific education, politics, and regional institutions, the book captures a central national experience: being the place where outside plans meet Pacific social intelligence and discover that the Pacific has plans of its own.
The National Voice
The national voice here is Pacific laughter: warm, indirect, cutting, communal, and patient enough to let foolishness reveal itself. Tiko speaks through kava bowls, church hymns, village gossip, speeches that take too long, obligations that cannot be refused, feasts arranged by rank, and the oceanic certainty that relationships matter more than schedules. That voice is not quaint. It is a sophisticated social technology.
The foreign development world assumes that the individual is the basic unit of life: the farmer who should maximise yield, the patient who should change diet, the student who should acquire skills, the worker who should increase productivity. Tikong life assumes that a person is a node in a web of kin, land, church, village, title, debt, reciprocity, memory, and joking obligation. No project can succeed if it cannot see that web. Most of the projects cannot see it.
For Fiji, the book's Fijian location matters even when Tiko looks more Tongan than Fijian. Suva has long been one of Oceania's great meeting places: university town, diplomatic centre, aid hub, postcolonial capital, regional crossroads. The voices gathered there are Fijian, Tongan, Samoan, Indo-Fijian, i-Kiribati, Solomon Islander, European, Australian, New Zealander, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical, and academic. Tales of the Tikongs catches that atmosphere of encounter and turns it comic. Its jokes depend on knowing how island courtesy can conceal refusal, how hospitality can absorb power, and how a community can survive by making the outsider feel honoured while quietly redirecting his project. The result is a national voice that refuses smallness. It laughs from the middle of the ocean, not the edge of the world.
The Historical Ground
Fiji became a British colony in 1874 and gained independence in 1970. Colonial rule preserved much indigenous Fijian communal land tenure while importing indentured labourers from India between 1879 and 1916 to work the sugar plantations. That policy produced the demographic and political complexity of modern Fiji: indigenous Fijians with protected communal land rights, Indo-Fijians central to the commercial and agricultural economy, and a state built around managing ethnic, chiefly, colonial, and democratic claims.
The post-independence Pacific also became one of the great laboratories of international development. From the 1960s onward, newly independent and self-governing island states received attention from the United Nations, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Britain, the European Community, churches, NGOs, and consultants moving from island to island with plans for fisheries, agriculture, health, education, governance, and productivity.
Hau'ofa wrote from inside that world. The University of the South Pacific, founded in Suva in 1968, served students from across the region and became a major intellectual centre for Oceania. It was also surrounded by development language: small island states, aid dependence, remittances, rural modernisation, capacity building, and economic vulnerability. The Cold War also shaped aid flows, as larger powers treated Pacific states as strategic clients as well as communities with needs of their own. Tales of the Tikongs belongs to this moment. It satirises not because development was irrelevant, but because it was everywhere, and because its experts often mistook Pacific patience for passivity and Pacific relational life for underdevelopment itself.
The Literary Landscape
Pacific literature in English emerged with force in the 1970s and 1980s. The journal Mana, founded in 1973, and the University of the South Pacific helped create a regional literary infrastructure where writers could publish across island boundaries. Albert Wendt of Samoa, Konai Helu Thaman of Tonga, Subramani of Fiji, Satendra Nandan of Fiji, and later Teresia Teaiwa and many others shaped a literature concerned with migration, colonialism, chiefly authority, Christianity, language, land, and modernity.
Hau'ofa's place in that landscape is distinctive because he made laughter intellectually serious. Albert Wendt's Leaves of the Banyan Tree is the great realist alternative, broader and darker in its account of social change. Subramani's writing speaks more directly from Fiji's multilingual and Indo-Fijian literary world. Satendra Nandan's work addresses Fiji's political and diasporic tensions. Choosing Tales of the Tikongs is choosing the Pacific regional voice at its most portable and subversive.
The book also anticipates Hau'ofa's later theoretical work. "Our Sea of Islands" would argue that Oceania is not tiny but immense, not isolated but connected by voyaging, kinship, migration, remittance, and memory. The stories make that claim narratively before the essay makes it conceptually. The foreign expert arrives with a map that makes Tiko small. The stories redraw the map through speech, ceremony, kinship, food, ocean, and delay. This makes Hau'ofa different from writers who merely record colonial damage. He records damage, but also restores intellectual scale to Pacific life. That is why the book remains central: it is not only funny about development; it changes the scale from which the Pacific is seen.
The Reading
Tiko Receives Development
In Tiko we were always being developed. We were developed before breakfast, developed after church, developed during the kava, and developed so thoroughly by visiting experts that some of us became quite undeveloped from exhaustion. The experts came from large countries where people looked at clocks with respect. They brought files, charts, vehicles with official markings, and the expression of persons who had seen poverty from an aeroplane and had already prepared a solution.
Tiko was small on their maps. On our maps it was the centre, with the sea around it, and beyond the sea our cousins, and beyond them more cousins, and beyond them the places where our children had gone to earn money and forget how to sit properly. The experts did not understand this. They saw water and called it distance. We saw water and called it road.
The first thing an expert must learn in Tiko is that silence is not agreement. Unfortunately, experts are busy people and cannot spend too much time learning first things. They come to the village meeting, sit in the chair placed for them, open the folder, and explain that the project will increase productivity, improve nutrition, strengthen governance, empower women, rationalise agriculture, modernise fisheries, and preserve traditional culture. This last part is always very popular, because it allows the experts to destroy traditional culture with deep respect.
The chief listens. The pastor listens. The women listen while calculating whether the visitors have brought enough tinned fish for the meal after the speeches. The young men listen with the faces of young men who have discovered that projects require drivers. The old men listen because it is rude not to listen. When the expert finishes, the chief says the matter is very important and requires careful consideration. The expert writes in his notebook: community support strong.
Ole Pasifikiwei
Ole Pasifikiwei worked in the Department of Development, which was a good department because no one knew exactly what it did and therefore everyone agreed it was necessary. His name, people said, came from the old Pacific way, though whether this was praise or warning depended on who was saying it and who was paying for the drinks.
Ole knew the habits of projects. A project is born first in a foreign office, where it is small and clean and full of purpose. It travels by document to Tiko, where it grows appendices. By the time it reaches the village, it has become fat with objectives, indicators, counterpart funding, gender components, environmental safeguards, and a budget line for evaluation. The trick is not to kill the project. That would be foolish. The trick is to feed it until everyone is satisfied and then let it sleep.
He could write reports of great beauty. If a pig had eaten the demonstration garden, he wrote that traditional livestock systems had interacted dynamically with introduced agricultural models. If the workshop participants had slept through the afternoon session, he wrote that the community had entered a period of reflective assimilation. If no one had adopted the improved fishing technique because it caught fish at the wrong time for ceremonial obligations, he wrote that uptake was pending further harmonisation with local knowledge systems.
The foreigners respected Ole because he understood their language. The Tikongs respected him because he understood theirs. These were not the same language, even when both were English.
Kava Time
Every important matter in Tiko eventually sat down before a kava bowl. The bowl was round, dark, patient, and wiser than most committees. Around it men arranged themselves according to rank, age, relation, and the complicated history of who had offended whose mother's cousin in 1962 and whether that offence had been properly repaired.
The expert invited to drink kava believed he was attending a cultural activity. He did not know he had entered parliament, court, theatre, church, archive, and weather station. The cup came to him. He clapped when told to clap, drank when told to drink, and tried not to show that the taste reminded him of muddy water strained through a rope. Then he checked his watch.
This was a serious mistake. In Tiko, time is not something a man owns privately in his pocket. Time belongs to the people sitting with him, to the story being told, to the ancestors who must be named before business can begin, to the joke that cannot be shortened because its path is part of its meaning. The expert had a schedule. The village had time. These two things met in the kava circle and regarded each other without affection.
At midnight, when the expert had forgotten his action points and discovered that his legs no longer wished to stand, the real discussion began. Not the discussion in the folder. The other one. Who would benefit? Which family would be asked to give land? Would the pastor approve? Would the women's committee be consulted before or after the decision already made? Could the project vehicle be used to take a sick auntie to hospital? These questions were not in the framework. Therefore they mattered.
Productive Gardens
One year the agricultural advisers came to increase food production. This surprised the Tikongs, who had been producing food for some time, though admittedly without quarterly reporting. The advisers brought improved seed, demonstration plots, fertiliser, and a young man with a degree who explained that yams could be made more efficient.
The Tikongs admired efficiency in moderation. They planted the demonstration plot exactly as instructed. The yams grew well. This pleased the advisers, who took photographs. Then came the harvest, and with the harvest came the problem that the yams had to go somewhere. In Tiko, yams are not merely eaten. They are given, displayed, compared, praised, envied, and remembered. A yam has relatives. A very large yam has politics.
The project wished to sell the surplus at market. The village wished to distribute it according to obligation. The advisers explained that market sales would generate income. The villagers explained that income was useful, but a brother-in-law insulted by a badly distributed yam could cost more than money. The advisers did not have a column for brother-in-law risk.
In the final report, the project was successful. Production had increased. In the village, the matter was more delicate. Three families were not speaking, one marriage had been postponed, the pastor had received more yams than the chief, and the chief had forgiven this publicly while remembering it privately. Development had entered the soil and produced fruit.
Healthy People
The health people came next. They had posters showing smiling families eating balanced meals. The families in the posters were thin, which made the Tikongs suspect they had not been loved properly. In Tiko, a good feast was evidence that God had not abandoned the people. A large body could be read as prosperity, generosity, rank, or the success of many aunties. It was not automatically a medical failure.
The programme taught exercise. The Tikongs enjoyed this part when the visitors exercised. There is no greater gift to village morale than a foreign consultant sweating under a palm tree while an old woman shouts encouragement from the shade. The programme also taught diet. Less fat, less sugar, less tinned meat, more vegetables. Everyone agreed this was wise. Then came Sunday, and wisdom sat politely in the corner while the feast did its work.
The project metrics improved. Attendance was excellent because the workshops had tea. Awareness increased because the questions on the evaluation form were similar to the answers given in the morning session. Behaviour change was more mysterious. When asked why they had not changed their eating, several participants explained that they had changed their thinking, which was the part the workshop had measured.
No one in Tiko opposed health. They opposed loneliness disguised as health: the idea that a person should eat separately from the family, refuse food offered with love, weigh the body as if it were an account book, and live longer by becoming socially impossible. The experts called this resistance. The Tikongs called it manners.
Fishing Properly
The fisheries project was perhaps the most beautiful. It brought boats with engines, nets of an impressive modern kind, and a plan for commercial expansion. Fish would be caught in greater quantity, sold in town, and converted into income. The lagoon, which had believed itself to be already useful, was promoted to resource.
The fishermen accepted the equipment gratefully. They knew good rope when they saw it. They also knew that fish are not only commodities swimming about waiting to be monetised. Fish belong to seasons, reefs, kin obligations, funerals, weddings, church fundraisers, chiefly presentations, and the old pleasure of going out with men whose lies one has known since childhood.
The new boats were used, but not always as intended. One carried a choir to a neighbouring island because the sea was calm and the choir was late. One carried pigs. One was borrowed for a funeral. Another was used for fishing in the proper sense, though the catch was distributed before it reached the market because several relatives had appeared at the beach with persuasive expressions.
The fisheries adviser was distressed. Leakage, he called it. The Tikongs agreed there was leakage. Everything leaks in the Pacific: boats, roofs, budgets, secrets, young people to Auckland, money back from Auckland, and plans into the hands of relatives. A thing that does not leak has no relationships.
Schooling
The school taught children many useful things, such as the names of European rivers and the proper spelling of words their grandparents had never needed. It taught them that intelligence arrived in books from elsewhere and that the past of Tiko was folklore, while the past of Europe was history. It taught them to write essays about development and to be ashamed of sitting on the floor.
Some children did very well. They won scholarships, travelled abroad, learned to speak in meetings, and returned with shoes unsuitable for mud. Their families were proud. Their villages were proud. The children themselves were proud, though they sometimes found that success had made them translators between people who loved them and institutions that measured them.
The old navigators had read stars, swells, birds, cloud, colour, and wind. The school did not examine these subjects. No certificate was available in knowing when the reef would be dangerous by the smell of the tide. No prize was given for remembering genealogies deep enough to prevent a foolish marriage. The experts called this lack of capacity. The old people called it forgetting.
Still, the Tikongs sent their children to school. Only a fool refuses a tool because it comes from a thief. English could be useful. Certificates could open doors. A government salary could feed many relatives. The difficulty was not learning the new knowledge. The difficulty was keeping the old knowledge from being laughed out of the room.
The Sea Of People
Many Tikongs lived away from Tiko. They lived in Auckland, Sydney, Honolulu, California, and places so cold that the ancestors must have wondered what offence had caused such exile. They worked in factories, hospitals, armies, offices, taxis, churches, and houses where they cared for other people's old people while sending money home to their own.
The development people counted remittances as income. The Tikongs counted them as love travelling by bank transfer. A son abroad did not become an individual simply because the country he lived in believed in individuals. His pay packet had cousins in it. His rent competed with school fees back home. His loneliness was weighed against the new roof on his mother's house.
This made the economists uneasy because the money did not behave like model money. It moved according to funerals, weddings, obligations, guilt, pride, church appeals, school fees, cyclones, and the sudden discovery that a nephew needed help. But the money built houses, paid fees, bought boats, and kept villages alive more reliably than many projects. It had no logo. This was its weakness.
The sea did not separate these people. It connected them. The experts saw migration as loss, dependency, distortion. The Tikongs saw an old skill in a new canoe. Once they had crossed ocean by stars. Now they crossed by aeroplane, overstayed visas, sent money through banks, and carried Tiko in plastic suitcases. The world was not small. The map was.
Report
At the end of every project there was a report. Reports were important because they proved to distant offices that events had occurred. A report could turn confusion into lessons learned, failure into capacity constraints, refusal into cultural factors, and success into a recommendation for further funding.
The Tikongs respected reports as they respected cyclones: powerful things from elsewhere that left paper everywhere. They attended closing ceremonies, sang hymns, thanked the donors, ate well, and received certificates. The expert gave a speech about partnership. The chief gave a speech about gratitude. Ole Pasifikiwei gave a speech about sustainability that was so excellent no one wished to test it.
Then the expert left. The vehicle went back to town. The project sign faded in the weather. The village returned to its arguments, obligations, gardens, fishing, church, remittances, jokes, and slow decisions. Some useful things remained: a water tank, a repaired road, a young woman who had learned accounting, a boat engine that still worked when handled by someone sensible. Much else became story.
This was not nothing. Stories are how Tiko files experience. The people remembered the expert who feared kava, the adviser who tried to schedule rain, the consultant who asked whether the chief had considered empowerment, and the workshop where the biscuits were better than the training. They laughed, and the laughter was not refusal of change. It was a way of deciding which changes deserved to stay.
Tiko continued. It was being developed, certainly. It was also developing the developers, though this achievement was not included in the final evaluation.
The Island's Answer
If the experts had stayed longer, perhaps they would have learned that Tiko was not opposed to improvement. A leaking roof should be mended. A sick child should see a doctor. A road that becomes soup in the rain should be lifted if there is money and a cousin with a machine. No one in Tiko preferred poverty because it was traditional. Poverty was never traditional; it was simply persistent.
What Tiko opposed was the insult hidden inside certain forms of help. The insult said that people without graphs had no knowledge, that people who gave food away did not understand economics, that people who prayed before meetings had confused religion with administration, and that people who took time were wasting it. The insult was wrapped in kindness, stamped by donors, and delivered with allowances.
So the Tikongs answered as Tikongs answer: with speeches, jokes, delays, feasts, compliance where compliance was harmless, resistance where resistance was necessary, and memory in all cases. They accepted the useful things. They turned the useless things into stories. They sent their children overseas and their love back home. They drank kava until the urgent people became sleepy. They let the sea remain a road.
And when the next project arrived, with new acronyms and better folders, the village gathered again. The chief listened. The pastor listened. Ole Pasifikiwei sharpened his pencil. The women prepared food. The expert spoke of partnership, and Tiko, generous as always, allowed him to believe he had invented it.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
The University of Hawai‘i Press edition is the most accessible edition for readers outside the Pacific. The link below points to the publisher's exact title page for this edition.
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