Daily Inspiration Quote by Kamisese Mara

“Ordeal” is doing the heavy lifting here. Kamisese Mara, a statesman who spent decades trying to hold Fiji together across ethnic, political, and chiefly lines, chooses a word that frames coups not as clever maneuvers or ideological “corrections,” but as trauma: something a society endures, not something it decides. The phrasing is almost clinical, yet it quietly indicts. Coups don’t just rearrange cabinets; they reorder daily life through fear, uncertainty, and the slow corrosion of trust in institutions.

The line’s restraint is the strategy. Mara doesn’t name villains, relitigate motives, or tally grievances. He collapses “two military coups” into a single ordeal, implying repetition as a kind of national injury - not an isolated event, but a pattern that leaves scars. That matters in Fiji’s late-1980s context, where the coups of 1987 were entangled with disputes over Indigenous Fijian power, Indo-Fijian political representation, and the legitimacy of democratic outcomes. In that environment, precision can be gasoline. Mara opts for compression and moral tone instead.

There’s also self-positioning in the passive construction: “had experienced.” It casts Fiji as the protagonist and the victim, and it invites a broad audience into shared memory without forcing them into a partisan corner. The subtext is a plea for stability and constitutionalism, delivered in the language of collective suffering rather than recrimination. It’s a statesman’s way of saying: whatever your side, this is what it cost.