Fiji became independent on October 10, 1970, after 96 years as a British colony, and joined the Commonwealth with Ratu Kamisese Mara as its first prime minister. The islands had been ceded to Queen Victoria in 1874 by their chiefs, who had been told they were getting protection in return. The handover at Suva was conducted with a good deal of ceremony on both sides, partly because the arrangement had held and partly because everyone knew what the colony had been built on. Sugar came next.
Sugar built it. Because the chiefs would not let their own people work the fields, about 60,000 indentured labourers were brought from India between 1879 and 1916 on five-year contracts, and most of them stayed on when the contracts ran out, so that by 1970 the population was split very nearly in half between people of Indian and indigenous Fijian descent. The two communities went to different schools, kept largely to themselves and, when the time came, voted differently.
The independence constitution was written around that split. The land was held communally. Most of it belongs to Fijian clans and cannot be sold, and leases to the sugar farmers were arranged through a board set up for the purpose. Most seats in parliament were allocated by community. Voters chose representatives from their own roll rather than from a common one, which was meant to reassure the indigenous minority about being outnumbered and which instead made ethnicity the permanent subject of Fijian politics.
Mara's Alliance Party held power for seventeen years. The arrangement broke in 1987, when a coalition drawing most of its votes from the Indian-Fijian community won the election in April and the army took over in May; the country was then declared a republic and left the Commonwealth. There have been coups in 1987, 2000 and 2006. Fiji rejoined the Commonwealth in 2014, and the sugar belt, the land leases and the two communities are still what its politics are about.