Daily Inspiration Quote by Kamisese Mara

There is a whole political autobiography packed into that awkward, almost looping syntax: “the cane field, the cane plantation I have.” Mara isn’t polishing a line for applause; he’s staging provenance. By grounding “sustained” in sugarcane, he ties legitimacy to land and labor rather than abstract nationalism. In Fiji, where the sugar industry became the economic spine under colonial rule and the social fault line between Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijian cane farmers, invoking the cane field is never just pastoral. It’s a claim about who feeds the country, who owns it, and who gets to speak for it.

The phrasing matters. “Sustained” reads as both material (income, stability) and moral (endurance, discipline). He presents himself as someone supported by production, not patronage. Yet the second clause - “the cane plantation I have” - flashes the hidden hierarchy: he is not merely a worker in the fields; he possesses a plantation. That subtle pivot lets him perform humility while keeping authority intact. It’s a tightrope common to postcolonial leadership: appear rooted, appear pragmatic, but never surrender the aura of stewardship.

Context sharpens the intent. Mara, a dominant figure in independent Fiji’s early decades, governed amid debates about land tenure, ethnic representation, and the distribution of economic power. “Cane” becomes shorthand for the hard arithmetic of governance: prosperity built on contested ground, sustained by an industry that binds communities together and sets them against each other.