Adi Kuini Speed

Adi Kuini Speed was a chief's daughter who led the party of the government the army had overthrown. She was born into a high chiefly family of Nadroga and married Timoci Bavadra, the doctor and trade unionist whose coalition won the Fijian election of April 1987 - a government led by indigenous Fijians but supported mainly by Indo-Fijian votes, which is what made it intolerable to the chiefly establishment. Sitiveni Rabuka's soldiers removed it after a month, and again in September when a negotiated settlement looked like restoring it. Bavadra died of cancer in November 1989 at fifty-five, and she took over the Fiji Labour Party's coalition partner and then the leadership of the opposition, which put a woman at the head of Fijian party politics for the first time. Her position was unusual and precarious. She was of exactly the class the coups had been staged to protect, arguing for a multiracial politics the same class regarded as a threat to indigenous paramountcy, and her chiefly rank was both what gave her standing and what made her a traitor in some Fijian eyes. Adi is a Fijian title of chiefly rank, not a given name, and it is carried for life. In a country where the Great Council of Chiefs nominated the president and confirmed the senate, holding it meant she could not simply be dismissed as an outsider by the institutions opposing her. She served as deputy prime minister in the government of 1999, which was itself overthrown by an armed takeover of parliament in May 2000 - the third such removal in thirteen years and the second she lived through. She died of cancer in 2004. Fiji had a further coup in 2006, and the pattern the 1987 coups established, of elections reversed whenever their outcome crossed the ethnic line, took another twenty years to break.

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