Mere Tora, a 76-year-old former teacher and civil servant, has been confirmed as the University of the South Pacific’s first iTaukei woman graduate — a milestone reached at the institution’s earliest commencement in 1971, just three years after USP opened its doors in 1968. Her graduation ceremony, held in a hangar and officiated by the late King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, places her at the forefront of Fiji’s early wave of locally trained women professionals.
Tora traces her beginnings to the village of Cuku in Wainiika, Tawake, Cakaudrove, where she was raised as the second of nine children. The rhythms of village life — collecting firewood, prawning, climbing trees and fishing — were tempered by a strict home ethos instilled by her father, a trained carpenter who returned after World War II to rebuild the family’s ancestral village. “Vuli vakaukauwa mo tamata yaga mai muri,” he told his children: study hard so you can be useful later in life, a maxim that guided Tora’s choices.
She attended Niusawa Methodist School in Taveuni before moving to Lelean Memorial School, and then seized the new opportunity to enroll at USP. “We were a very small group,” she recalled of her university days. “In my class, there were less than ten women.” When she graduated in 1971, Tora said she did not view the achievement as exceptional at the time, framing it instead as the fulfillment of her father’s command to work hard.
Her professional life began in the classroom. Tora taught social science, geography and English at All Saints Junior Secondary School, and often took on subjects she had not formally trained for, including vosa vakaviti. She later returned to university to complete a Bachelor of Education and served as one of the pioneer teachers at Nasinu Secondary School, established to widen access for students from rural and maritime communities.
Tora moved into education administration in 1990, joining the Ministry of Education headquarters as an Education Officer (Secondary). In 2000 she transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, serving two tours in Wellington before retiring from public service in 2017. Now based in Upper Ragg, Tamavua, she spends time with her grandchildren and remains an outspoken advocate for reading and education.
“I’d make them sit and read,” she said, lamenting what she sees as a decline in young people’s reading habits compared with her generation. “Reading helped us express ourselves. It shaped how we thought and understood the world.” Tora has also observed broader shifts in social behaviour: “Respect is not the same. Respect for elders, for authority, even for each other.”
The confirmation of Tora as USP’s first iTaukei woman graduate adds an important personal dimension to the university’s early history and underscores the role of education in advancing opportunities for Fijian women. Her life — from village responsibilities and early schooling through classroom teaching, public service and diplomatic postings — offers a living link between the formative years of national higher education and current conversations about literacy, values and leadership in Fiji. Her enduring message remains the one she inherited: work hard, study well, and be useful to the community.
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