Despite Methodism being the dominant Christian denomination in Fiji, there are not many Methodist schools in Suva, and in colonial times there were fewer still; several of the present schools are fairly recent foundations, like the John Wesley College in Raiwaqa, founded in 1996, with its associated primary school also a post-Independence school. 1 This essay concentrates on three colonial Suva Methodist schools: Dudley House School, Suva Methodist Boys' School and Ballantine School. There are very good reasons for the limited number of Methodist schools in Suva, and they lie in both the history of the way the Methodist mission worked and the history of Suva itself. As other contributors have noted, Suva grew as an administrative and commercial centre and in the first 50 years at least of its history had a relatively low iTaukei population. European administrators and Indo-Fijian merchants made up the bulk of the visible population, with iTaukei Fijians confined mostly to domestic, labouring and other manual tasks.
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