![]() “New Zealanders were not to know that forced removals, pass laws, and other suspensions of civil liberties, so often criticised of governments elsewhere, had been applied here. The government suppressed the shameful history of its actions in Parihaka and hid the criminality of its own policies, the tribunal wrote. That was if they heard about them at all. ![]() In the Waitangi Tribunal’s 1996 Taranaki report-the most scathing it has ever written-the tribunal wrote that Māori children “were schooled to believe that those of their forebears whose images they should have carved with pride were simply rebels, savages, or fanatics”. Yet generations of New Zealand children have grown up in ignorance of a man whose message and practice of peace and nonviolent protest preceded theirs by decades. It is inconceivable that an Indian child growing up today would not know about Gandhi, just as it is impossible to imagine a child in the United States not knowing about Martin Luther King Jr, or a South African child Nelson Mandela. ![]() “History says that Te Whiti was defeated,” Murchie said at the end of her allotted two minutes on air, “but the moral victory was with he who turned the other cheek.” She encouraged me to read Dick Scott’s influential book Ask That Mountain, at that time the definitive account of Te Whiti and Parihaka, and I did. They passed the request to Murchie, who sent me the transcript with a covering letter. I wrote to Radio New Zealand to ask if I could be sent a copy of her talk. “Gandhi belongs not only to India but to all of us,” Murchie said, then added, “Such is the slant of our teaching of history in this country that few New Zealanders know that last century there was a Māori who can be likened to Gandhi.” Then she spoke his name. She meant the movie, just released in New Zealand, with its by turns harrowing and heroic scenes of the clash between coloniser and colonised. On May 22, it was the turn of Elizabeth Murchie, a human rights commissioner and campaigner for Māori women’s health. In those days, just before seven o’clock on weekday mornings, the National Programme broadcast a short “Morning Comment” read by an invited guest. Until 1983, I would have had no answer to that question. He seems to be asking, “Who do you say that I am?” I stand up from my desk and look Te Whiti o Rongomai in the eye. Another sneaked a photograph while he was under house arrest in Nelson. One sketched him secretly on his shirt cuff while Te Whiti spoke at a meeting. Rather, he had seen how images can be used to reinforce racial stereotypes, and he wanted no part of that. It had nothing to do with his soul being stolen, that old cliché about superstitious natives. Te Whiti did not allow himself to be photographed or even sketched. The painting is an impression, not a likeness. Behind him is the mountain, Taranaki, from whose summit rises a strange cloud, like a puff of smoke. ![]() I stuck a postcard print of him there in 2000, when the original painting, by Tony Fomison, was shown in an exhibition called ‘Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance’. He watches me from the wall of the study where I write. Written by Kennedy Warne Photographed by Alexander Turnbull Library
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