The dust has settled at the ANZ Stadium and Ratu Kadavulevu School has written a new page in the annals of the Fiji Secondary Schools Rugby competition by winning all the grades’ final. With all the hype and arguments on social media, you cannot but admire the spirit and courage of the RKS boys.
I’d like to clarify and elaborate on two pieces of information that over the years have been forgotten and mistakenly written and broadcast in the media, namely radio, newspaper and television.
First of all the media has somehow or rather mistakenly named the RKS teams as “the boys from Delainakaikai”. This immediately tells everyone that RKS location is called Delainakaikai. This is a mistake that needs to be corrected as it is far from the truth and it would be interesting to find out how it originated. For the readers’ information RKS is situated on a spur named in the maps as Delanivanua or as is locally known as Delanalevu. The landowning unit is the mataqali Naitaka of the Yavusa Korolevu of Nananu Village. Delainakaikai is a mountain ridge about 30 kilometres west of RKS and is owned by the mataqali Wairiki of Namena Village. Delainakaikai is barely visible from RKS as it is obscured by Vicovicolevu another mountain ridge. It is important that the present students and those of us who went to RKS know about this.
Secondly, Lodoni has been the name place given to the location of RKS. This name originated from the Gregg brothers who farmed the 10 acre piece of land immediately in front of the school. Later on a shop was built and operated by Tong Lee, while an old English lady simply known as Mrs Bently operated a postal agency on a piece of the same land. The Gregg brothers came from London, England, thus the name Lodoni.
The people of the yavusa Naovini settled on a piece of land close to where dorm number 30 and 29 used to be. They were hired on as labourers for the Gregg brothers. This settlement was later on bulldozed at the orders of Ratu Sukuna to make way for the new RKS.
These people moved on to Waivou and named their new village Lodoni Vakaviti in memory of the Gregg brothers.
I hope that this information will be useful to the students and the teachers as well. Nevertheless, cheers to the Heron state. Well done boys. Proud of you!
