As we commemorate Girmit Day, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade, Manoa Kamikamica says let us be a nation that not only remembers, but honours, not only commemorates, but uplifts and not only mourns the suffering, but builds the future they never lived to see.
While speaking during the Girmit Day commemoration event at Subrail Park last night, Kamikamica says more than 60,000 Indians were brought to Fiji not for wealth or glory, but under coercion, deception, and desperation.
He says they endured backbreaking labour in the cane fields and bore physical wounds and emotional scars.
Kamikamica says they stripped of freedoms, many perished nameless and many wept silently in foreign soil, only with faith and memory as their comfort.
He says through prayer, through ritual, through community—they endured and they sang their bhajans and qawwali in the darkness of their barracks and passed down language, values, and customs—not through books but through lived devotion.
The Deputy Prime Minister says they planted not just cane, but hope.
While highlighting the Northern tourism development plan, Kamikamica has reminded the people of the North that they, their stories and their future matters to this government.
The Deputy Prime Minister says the sugar industry was built on the backs of the Girmitiyas and now has challenges of its own but in Labasa, the story continues—not in decline, but in defiance and resilience.
He adds they have held strong where others have faltered and have preserved what others have forgotten.
Girmit commemoration events conclude tomorrow at Subrail Park in Labasa.
The public holiday for Girmit is tomorrow.
