On a fog-soaked morning on the summit ridge of Mount Uluiqalau in Taveuni, writer Daryl Tarte found himself at the centre of a story that Fijians have told for generations: the velociously elusive veli, or leka, Fiji’s “little people.” Tarte, recounting the episode in his 2014 memoir Fiji: A Place Called Home, says he left his binoculars hung on a steel post, walked down the ridge to set camp and, on returning minutes later, found the binoculars gone. A local guide, staring into the mist, whispered one word: “Veli.”
The missing binoculars open a longer string of encounters and beliefs Tarte records from across the islands. His guide, Laisiasa, told of a dawn pig-hunting trip when his dogs went rigid and growled at a small, naked, hairy figure standing by a tree. “He wasn’t wearing any clothes and was almost as hairy as a dog, with the hair on his head hanging to his waist, and eyes that glowed like fire,” Laisiasa told Tarte. When the dogs chased, the veli ran only a short distance before stopping; the dogs remained too frightened to pursue further.
Tarte also quotes his father’s memory of seeing a veli sitting in a frangipani tree and dropping down to scurry away like a monkey. Encounters like these — marked by strange odours, furtive glimpses, and animals reacting with fear — are recounted from Serua to Cakaudrove, and from Kadavu to Bua. Anecdotes range from three girls in Monasavu in the 1970s finding a veli bathing under a village pipe, to a bulldozer driver spotting a small watcher at the jungle edge, to a Suva taxidriver abandoning his cab after seeing a small figure on Reservoir Road. Schoolchildren in Tavua chased a small creature into cane fields where, it was said, it vanished into a cave.
The veli are not a modern invention but woven into colonial and missionary-era records. In 1922 colonial administrator B. Brewster wrote in Hill Tribes of Fiji that locals insisted on a dwarf or pygmy people living in woods, beside brooks in hollow trees and eating wild bananas and kava; a fern, iri ni veli, bears their name. Missionary historian Thomas Williams recorded an elderly Fijian in 1931 who spoke with conviction of “little gods” that assembled on mountain tops to sing and dance. Even earlier, naturalist Berthold Seemann noted tali tales during his travels in 1862, describing small beings — some winged, some dressed in tapa — who were believed to be angered if their trees were cut.
The veli reached national attention in July 1975 when students at Lautoka Methodist Mission School reported seeing eight small, black-haired figures in nearby forest, sparking front-page reports and a prolonged watch over an alleged pit where the figures were said to have sheltered. Australian researcher Tony Healy later visited and documented the episode for his work Monster Safari, speaking to witnesses who recalled small black figures crawling from a tunnel. Those episodes — like the many one-off sightings — remain part of Fiji’s oral archive, recorded alongside centuries-old lore.
Whether remembered as mischievous spirits, remnants of earlier peoples or guardians of particular trees and places, the veli occupy a persistent place in the Fijian imagination. Tarte’s mountain anecdote and the patchwork of accounts that follow it underline how, for many older Fijians, belief in the little people is less a ghost story than an element of relationship to the land: a reminder that the forests and mountain ridges carry histories, names and presences that are not easily catalogued or dismissed.
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