Ba Town is a commercial melting pot renowned for fostering some of the largest business houses in the country, with many eminent families claiming their roots here. The cane-belt town is named after the province it falls under, and located along the Kings Rd on the Western coast of Viti Levu, Fiji’s largest island. Ba is about a 40 minute drive from Lautoka City.
Built on the banks of the Ba River, it is also known as Fiji’s soccer town, given the widespread support of local football from its community, the many championships won by its soccer teams and as the site of the sport’s sole, local training institution, the Fiji Football Academy, in Yalalevu.
Ba has a colourful history as an early European settlement for sugar and cotton plantation owners and indentured labourers who were shipped from India and the Solomon Islands to work on these farms in appalling conditions by the Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR) Company. The Now known as the Fiji Sugar Corporation, the CSR was headquartered in Sydney, Australia and opened the Rarawai Mill on the banks of the Ba River in 1886, followed by the establishment of the cane-breeding Agricultural Experimental Station in 1904. The mill is still operated by the FSC.
Built on the banks of the Ba River, the Rarawai Mill has been repeatedly inundated with 32 floods from 1892 to 2014, at an average of once every 3.8 years, according to Risk Frontiers. It was commercial enterprises that were established to cater to the CSR workforce and employees that saw the formation of the township.
One of the country’s first Wesleyan schools was established in Ba in 1899. Now the site of Ba Methodist High School at Nailaga Village, the Matavelo Girls School was initially a preparatory institution for indigenous Fijian girls and young women, teaching them English and training students in what was considered best practises for motherhood, hygiene and piousness.
