The Mountain Road of the Kai Colo

Josefa Naulu · Endorsed in supplied archive

The coastal chiefs called them 'kai colo' — people of the interior, wild people. But the mountain people had roads older than any chiefdom, roads of song and salt, and when the colonial wars came, it was those roads that saved them.

Cultural context

'Kai colo' (interior people) is a Fijian term historically used by coastal Fijians, sometimes pejoratively. The highlands of Viti Levu saw significant conflict during Fiji's colonial period (the 'Little War' of the 1870s). Song-maps and chanted trail knowledge are documented in Fijian ethnomusicology.

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