Joeli Bulu

On August 3, 1838, the Scottish missionary David Cargill wrote a short note in his diary. He lived on Lakeba, an island in the east of Fiji. Joeli Bulu, he wrote, had gone to live in Narothake, a village on the same island. There were a few Fijians there who worshipped God, and Joeli would teach them. Cargill added that this man was learning the Fijian language very diligently.

Four days later Cargill went to the village himself. The believers were grateful, he noted, that a teacher now lived among them. They were kind to him and to his wife.

These are a few lines in a European’s diary. The teacher himself was a Tongan of around twenty-eight, a Christian for only five years. He came from another country, with another language. He would stay there for almost forty years. He became the first islander in Fiji to be given sole charge of a church district, he started congregations in places no European missionary had yet been, and he ended as Bible teacher to the most powerful chief in Fiji. When he was old, he told his life to a missionary, who wrote it down and translated it.

That story begins with a boy who wanted nothing to do with the new faith, and a clear night.

TWO TAHITIANS IN NUKU'ALOFA

Tonga is an island kingdom in the Pacific Ocean, east of Fiji. Joeli Bulu was born there around 1810. Exactly where, I have not been able to find. In Tongan his name was later written as Siaoeli Pulu.

When he was a boy, Christianity came to Tonga. Around 1824 there were already two teachers from Tahiti in Nuku’alofa, the capital on the island of Tongatapu. They were islanders themselves. In 1826 the Wesleyan missionaries came, among them John Thomas. Wesleyans were Methodists, followers of the English preacher John Wesley. In 1830 they made an agreement with the London Missionary Society, another Protestant mission organization: Tonga and Fiji would be for the Methodists, Samoa for the London mission.

The greatest change came from a Tongan chief. Taufa’ahau became a Christian and in 1831 took the name King George Tupou I. He would bring all of Tonga under his rule. According to the missiologist Ewan Stilwell, that was the pattern in Tonga: a chief was converted and then tried to bring his family and his people with him.

In Tongan the new faith was called the lotu. You could take up the lotu, the way you choose a new road. At first Joeli Bulu did not want to. He turned against it, as he later told in his autobiography. A museum description accompanying a photograph of him calls him a rascal in his younger years. The description does not say where that label comes from.

“THAT I MAY LIVE AMONG THE STARS”

What turned him around was a promise. He heard that the lotu spoke of a home in heaven. One clear evening he looked up at the stars. He later told that he decided then: “I will lotu so that I may live among the stars.”

We know this sentence only from his own story. The Australian church historian John Garrett found it so telling that in 1982 he named his book on the rise of Christianity in the Pacific To Live Among the Stars. A young Tongan looking up at the sky and wanting to live there: for Garrett, that one sentence held the longing of a whole region.

I find it an honest sentence. There is nothing in it yet about sin or about Christ. It is the longing of someone who senses that there is more than the islands under his feet. Do you recognize that? That is how it began for him, and it did not stay with that evening.

EYES THAT WERE OPENED

In 1833 Joeli Bulu became a Christian. He was about twenty-three. According to the museum description it happened after he heard the preaching of John Thomas. It coincided with a great revival in Tonga. Stilwell, on the authority of an older study, mentions nine thousand full members within six years. That figure comes from within the mission itself.

Bulu described his conversion as a struggle. He went through a time when he saw his sin and found no rest. Then one day he listened to a missionary speaking about the love of Christ. His eyes were opened, he said. He had wept from fear and sorrow, and now he wept for joy. His heart was full of love for Him who had loved him and given Himself for him.

Those last words are almost exactly the words of Paul: who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Galatians 2:20). Bulu had evidently heard them and made them his own.

Not everyone was pleased with his choice. According to the story Garrett retells from his autobiography, his own family wanted to club him to death. Bulu heard of the plan, fled into the bush and prayed there. This story too we know only from him.

A MAN ON THE PATH

Meanwhile work had begun in Fiji. On October 12, 1835, the Methodist missionaries William Cross and David Cargill arrived on Lakeba, an island in the Lau group in eastern Fiji. They were not the first. Tongan Christians already lived in that part of Fiji, and they supported the work from the start. A Fijian, Josua Mateinaniu, had become a Christian in Tonga and went back to his country to look for villages that were open.

Fiji in those years was a land of rival chiefs. Wars were fought between powerful centers such as Bau and Rewa, and the eating of fallen enemies took place. The missionaries could do little there without the protection of chiefs, and without people who knew the language and the customs.

So they asked Tonga for teachers. Bulu later told how the news reached him. He was walking along a path, and a man told him that the missionaries in Fiji had asked for help. He felt he had to go and bring the good news to people who did not know God. When he told a missionary, the missionary said of his own accord that he had already thought Bulu should be one of them.

In a story like that I hear how calling often works. An ordinary message, an inner knowing, and someone else who says the same thing without being prompted. Bulu went.

SIX PREACHERS FROM VAVA'U

In 1838 King George sent a group of teachers to Fiji. Cargill wrote that six Tongan lay preachers had come from Vava’u, the northern island group of Tonga. Joeli Bulu was one of them, and he was married. I have not found his wife’s name in any source.

There are small differences about the journey. An article in the Fiji Times from 2018 says that he came to Fiji with the English missionary James Calvert. Other sources speak only of the group the king sent. What is certain is that in August 1838 he was living on Lakeba and teaching in Narothake, as Cargill noted.

The work on Lakeba was more than preaching. The missionary Richard Lyth had brought a small printing press. Bulu helped print catechisms and portions of the Bible there, in a language he was still learning himself. A catechism is a booklet of questions and answers about the faith.

Tongan Christians already lived in this part of Fiji, and a Tongan teacher could get closer to people than an Englishman. He also remained a stranger, and a stranger bringing a new faith.

“IT IS A SHARK”

From Lakeba, Bulu went to Rewa, a powerful district on the river on the largest island, Viti Levu. There something happened that he later told at length.

A young chief asked him to go swimming. Bulu refused at first, because of the sharks. The chief persuaded him. Together with some boys they sailed toy canoes on the river. Bulu swam to the other side and wanted to swim back. Then he saw movement in the water. He had dreamed about it before. “It is a shark; my dream is true,” he thought.

The shark bit him. According to his own account he thought his life was over. He fought, pushed his hand into the animal’s throat and dragged it toward the bank. There the shark swam away. According to Garrett he had been bitten in the thigh and the arm and collapsed on the bank. He survived.

This story comes from one mouth: Bulu’s own. I have found no other account of it. I tell it because it belongs to his life, and because it shows how close death was to him in those years.

BY CANOE TO VANUA LEVU

Rewa became unsafe. A war was growing between Bau and Rewa, and the missionaries left. Bulu went to Viwa, a small island right next to Bau, where the English missionary John Hunt lived. That station too later closed because of the wars.

Hunt sent him by canoe to Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second large island. He was to scout out where the mission might begin. An islander sent ahead to places where Europeans had not yet gone: that happened often in the Pacific.

Bulu was later stationed at Nadi on Vanua Levu, also spelled Nandi in the sources. This Nadi lies on Vanua Levu and should not be confused with the town of Nadi near the airport on Viti Levu. He worked there with the English missionaries Watsford and Ford, after a hurricane had destroyed the houses on the coast.

“NOBODY MUST FIGHT”

On Vanua Levu he met opposition. According to Garrett, who retells his autobiography, people stole his pigs, killed his chickens and wrecked his gardens. One night the village was surrounded. Bulu told the Christians to sit down, without weapons. “Nobody must fight.”

The attackers said later that they had not been able to use their weapons. Men of the tribe came to him with a tabua, a polished whale’s tooth. In Fiji that is a precious gift you give with a request, a reconciliation or an important occasion. They admitted that they had stolen his pigs.

Another story from his own mouth tells of a voyage on a king’s great sea canoe. A storm rose that nearly sank the vessel. Bulu prayed, and the wind dropped. This too we know only from his own testimony.

Stilwell writes that his life was in danger more than once because of chiefs who were against the lotu. Which of these stories happened exactly as told, no one can now check. What is certain is that he stayed. A stranger without weapons in a land full of war. What would you have done, if your pigs were stolen and your house surrounded?

ONO, AUGUST 18, 1850

In 1848 Bulu was given a responsibility no islander before him had received. He was placed in sole charge of the Ono circuit, on the island of Ono-i-Lau in the far south of the Lau group. Among Methodists a circuit is an area with several congregations under one minister.

On August 18, 1850, he was ordained on Ono-i-Lau by the missionary David Hazlewood. He became a Native Assistant Missionary, an assistant missionary from the local people. He was the first to receive that title. Stilwell counts almost twenty years of service up to that point, evidently from his conversion in 1833.

The title also says something about the relationships. A European was called a missionary, an islander an assistant. By then Bulu had done the work in Fiji for twelve years, often alone, and he stayed below the English missionaries in rank. I do not judge that from the standpoint of my own time, but it belongs to the picture if you want to look honestly at how the mission worked back then.

A GRAVE IN WAIRIKI

After Ono he went back to Nadi. There was fighting. Two men of the mission were killed while cutting reeds for roofs. The town was burned after the enemy broke a promise to spare the inhabitants. Bulu took his wife and children to Bua for their safety.

After that he was stationed with the Tongan Aaron Fotofili in Cakaudrove, the realm of the Tui Cakau on Taveuni and the south of Vanua Levu. He began the work there before there were any European missionaries. Later Waterhouse and Carey came. In Wairiki, on Taveuni, it was mainly women and children, in his own words, who were diligent at the mission schools.

Here too the chiefs were unpredictable. Ratu Ngolea, later Tui Cakau, was at first friendly to the mission. When he asked the Christians to fight with him in a war near Macuata and they refused, he threatened to attack them on his return. According to a Fijian newspaper article about the autobiography, Ngolea took one of Bulu’s daughters and forced her to live with him. Nothing more is said about it, and I will leave it there.

In Wairiki his wife died. He told it in one sentence: he went on, but his wife did not go with him, for she had died at Wairiki and there he had buried her. She had come with him from Tonga. When she died, I do not know.

The station moved to Waikava, on Fawn Harbour. There Bulu was put in charge of a training school for catechists, Fijian teachers who in turn went out into the villages. Stilwell writes that he had already begun training his own converts when the mission could not send him helpers. According to an article in the Fiji Times, some of his students later went to New Britain, in present-day Papua New Guinea. I have not been able to check that further.

AT THE COURT OF CAKOBAU

In the last part of his life Bulu lived on Bau, the small island where Ratu Seru Cakobau ruled. Cakobau was the most powerful chief in Fiji. In 1854 he became a Christian and renounced the eating of people. After that large parts of the population turned to Christianity. On October 10, 1874, Cakobau ceded Fiji to Great Britain, and Fiji became a British colony.

On Bau, Bulu was chaplain and Bible teacher to Cakobau and his family. The Tongan boy who had once opposed the lotu now taught the king of Bau.

A photograph survives from those years, probably taken in the early 1870s. It is now in an Australian collection. You see an older man with a beard, dressed as a Fijian chief, in a wrap, holding something that looks like a fly whisk. A Tongan who had come home in Fiji.

A VOICE SOMEONE ELSE WROTE DOWN

In that time Bulu told his life to the missionary Lorimer Fison, who translated it. George Stringer Rowe edited the text. In 1871 the Wesleyan mission in London published Joel Bulu: The Autobiography of a Native Minister in the South Seas. The story tells of fires, storms, wars, floods and escapes from death. In 1976 the missiologist Alan Tippett and Tomasi Kanailagi produced an annotated edition. It was reissued in 2013.

I have to say honestly: almost everything we know of his inner life comes from that one book. It is his testimony, written down by a European missionary and edited for English readers. I have not been able to consult the original text myself; I know it through quotations in Stilwell and in the Fiji Times. Where Cargill’s diaries and the church records touch his story, they agree with what he tells. Nobody else has been able to check the miracle stories.

That one book is also a rarity. Hundreds of islanders went as missionaries to other islands in the nineteenth century. Of most of them, not a word of their own survived. From the Cook Islands alone, according to recent archival research, more than two hundred and fifty went out. The Tahitian Papeiha went to Aitutaki in 1821 with the English missionary John Williams. Cook Islanders went to Samoa, Vanuatu and southern Papua. The colonial archives mainly record the names of Europeans. The names of women are often missing altogether.

In Fiji, what had happened in Tonga happened again. In 1875, the year a measles epidemic in Fiji took about forty thousand lives, eighty-three Fijian men volunteered to go with the missionary George Brown to New Britain. Nine were chosen. Their leader, Aminio Baledrokadroka, told the colonial officials that they had given themselves to the work of God, whether they would die or live. Within three years most of them were dead. Three were killed, others died of malaria. According to Stilwell, by the middle of the twentieth century more than three hundred Fijians had served as missionaries on other islands.

Stilwell writes that without these islanders the gospel would never have spread so quickly through the Pacific. The history of the mission in that region is often told with the names of Williams, Hunt and Calvert. The work in the villages was done to a large extent by people like Bulu.

BESIDE JOHN HUNT ON VIWA

Joeli Bulu died on May 7, 1877, on Bau. He had worked in Fiji for almost forty years. Cakobau, his old friend, provided a coffin and saw to the funeral. He was buried on Viwa, next to the grave of John Hunt, the missionary who had once sent him by canoe to Vanua Levu. Many mourned him.

In Fiji they still know his name. At Lelean Memorial School, a Methodist school in Davuilevu near Nausori, one of the four houses is named after him.

On Viwa an Englishman and a Tongan lie side by side, on a small island across from Bau. When it is clear, the stars stand over those two graves at night, the same stars a young Tongan once looked at when he decided that he wanted to live there.