TENSE ISLAND DRAMA.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 165, 14 June 1926, Page 4

TENSE ISLAND DRAMA.

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NATIVE WOMAN KILLED. SUVA (Fiji), May 20. It is the custom among natives that a woman caught in sin must die. Custom dies hard in the islands, and onco again “murder,” as the white man styles it, has been committed. A husband has lost his wife, and a lover has lost his sweetheart—and the tribesmen are content. In the white man’s gaol is a man who is not worrying, even though the white man’s law lias been invoked against him. The little town of Nabuisa nestles away up in the mountains of the province of Colo North, in the island of Viti Levu. Here a native woman named Vulore Salusalu, lived with a man who was not her husband. The pair had a youngster, aged 18 months. For five years the woman had lived in peace, separated from her husband Seremaia, who worked far away. But a day of reckoning was coming. One Sunday, May 2, Nemesis, in tho person of a man, came up the jungle path to the town. He carried a cane knife, a rather unusual weapon for a native, who generally prefers the club of his ancestors. He came to a washing pool on the confines of the village, where three women were washing clothes.

TRIBE LOOKS ON. Suddenly, he stiffened, rushed at the erring wife, and with a growl gripped her by the hand and slashed at her until she was a mass of freely bleeding wounds. Finally, death came to end her agony. Only then did the killer let go, as liis victim sink to the ground. Her companion had called out to the men of the town, but no one moved to help. Then the slayer remembered the child. It was a pledge of the woman’s guilt, and had to die, and he went off to find it. But by this time the village constable had awakened to the fact that the law expected him to keep order. The retribution had been executed, and the native law had been fulfilled, so now the majesty of the white man’s law must intervene.