Noah’s Gang as an example of contemporary street hustling in Nadi, Fiji: the implications for cross-cultural power relations

Noah’s Gang is or was a group of older Indigenous Fijian ‘street boys’ who interacted with tourists in Nadi Town, Fiji Islands, from around 2013 to the present. This chapter will describe their relations with mostly white tourists in Nadi and how power relations are constructed, changed and subverted via these interactions. The ‘hustler’ lifestyle provides opportunities and challenges, but a set of malleable and consistent values are observed rooted in Indigenous and Christian village culture mixed with reggae culture as imported into Fiji from Jamaica and adjusted to the local setting. People like Noah’s Gang have become unofficial Indigenous public faces, compared to the official public faces presented at tourist resorts. Hence, they provide almost a dark tourism experience for those they interact with, as well as a sense of danger and opportunity. In this chapter, we describe how they helped a white English tourist who had his luggage stolen and their interaction with a Polish woman who inquired about their black magic. If we view sustainability and experiential as going beyond the sanitized corporate experiences provided by the tourist resorts, we might see Noah’s Gang as rising to the occasion and providing us with some answers to these debates.