FOOTNOTES:
[105] The Government has succeeded in persuading a few chiefs to keep milch cows, but they are not milked regularly.
CHAPTER XXIX
YANKONA (Kava)
Yankona (Yaqona) the Kava or Ava of the Polynesians, is an infusion of the root of the pepper plant (Piper methysticum), which is indigenous in Fiji. Throughout Polynesia it occupies the place which coffee takes among the Arabs, that is to say, it is used on occasions of ceremony and in the entertainment of strangers, and its preparation, even in private houses, is always accompanied by a ceremonial more or less elaborate. Its geographical distribution in the Pacific may be roughly described by saying that the races that chew betel do not drink yankona. The plant is unknown in the Solomon Islands and the other Melanesian groups, with the exception of the Banks and New Hebrides Islands. We know that the Banks Islanders acquired the habit of drinking it only recently, and it is possible that the New Hebrides natives learned the habit from labourers returning from the plantations in Fiji. Kava-drinking, indeed, seems to be so purely a Polynesian custom, that the Fijians might be supposed to have learned it from the Polynesians were it not for the fact that the yankona songs of the hill tribes are so archaic that the people have quite forgotten their original meaning. In the New Hebrides and Banks Islands the quasi-religious character of the custom has not yet given place to everyday use, and yankona is not drunk by women.
Even in Fiji itself there was considerable diversity of custom. Thomas Williams says it was not in common use in Vanualevu and part of Vitilevu in his time. The hill tribes of Vitilevu seem always to have used it, though its use was confined to the old men, who often drank it to excess. They
prepared it without the elaborate ceremonial with which the coast tribes have made us familiar, but on great occasions they made use of a peculiar weird chant, accompanied by gestures whose meaning has been long forgotten. In Williams's time the natives used to assert that the true Fijian mode of preparing the root was by grating, and that the practice of chewing it, which is now universal throughout Fiji, was introduced from Tonga. About thirty years ago King George of Tonga absolutely prohibited the chewing of kava as a filthy habit, and the practice of grating the root or pounding it between two stones has now become so universal that the Tongans regard the Fijian habit of chewing it, which they themselves introduced, with the utmost disgust. The customs of the two countries have thus been reversed.
A COLD-BLOODED EXECUTION