Kaunitoni

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

Content

According to the myth the ancestors of the Fijians from the Egyptian Thebes come. They drove up the Nile, and reached Lake Tanganyika, where they settled. Conflicts with neighboring tribes they led in the 10th century BC under their chief Lutunasobasoba with a canoe names Kaunitoni eastward to put to sea, the sun. Along the way she takes a storm, and they lose all their possessions, including the chief stones with inscriptions. You are stranded on the northwest coast of Viti Levu, where they build a first settlement, Vuda (origin). As Lutunasobasoba is old, his brother Degei makes on to find higher ground land for settlement. He chooses the mountains in the northeast of the island ( around Rakiraki ). There, from the wood of the pandanus tree ( fidschian.: na kau Vadra ) built a house for chief Lutunasobasoba what the entire settlement is the name of: Nakauvadra. After Lutunasobasobas death, the population spread all over Fiji.

A Fijian version is for example the song Koi ra na Vuda ( Our ancestors ).

Formation

Originally it was reported that in Fiji - unlike, say, the Rotuma Islands, Samoa or New Zealand - is no myth to the colonization of the island from elsewhere. First mentioned in 1892, Basil Thomson, referring to an inhabitant of the island of Beqa a legend that the ancestors of the Fijians had been washed up on the west coast of Viti Levu. In the same year a competition was held to determine the definitive version of this myth of the Fijian magazine Na Mata; those published in English in 1895 then Thomson.

There may be actually an old myth that has been kept secret long before strangers; possibly the Kaunitoni - myth but also of recent origin. So reports a graduate of the School of Mission of Navuloa ( 1892-94 ) that there teaching aids were used, which produced connections between Fiji and Tanzania on a linguistic basis. In addition, there were repeated demands of the whites of the origins of the island's population, whether from pure research interest, whether for the purposes of land administration ( Native Lands Commission). So the Kaunitoni myth could also be due to external influence.

Swell

Peter France: The Kaunitoni migration: notes on the genesis of a Fijian tradition. In: The Journal of Pacific History. Vol 1 (1966 ), pp. 107-113

• Melanesian mythology