Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“TO THE CITY” by Alexander Christie-Miller (William Collins publishers, $NZ 39:99)

 

            Alexander Christie-Miller is an English journalist who, for seven years, lived in Istanbul and was the Turkey correspondent for The Times of London. He also wrote for Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Atlantic and other publications. He gave very detailed accounts of both the politics and the daily lives of the people of Istanbul. A relatively young man, he married a Turkish woman, but eventually they had to leave the country because politics drove them out. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government was becoming more and more authoritarian. Dissent was being punished. Erdogan and his increasingly Islamist regime jailed, fined or deported journalists who said negative things about the situation.

            To the City deals mainly with three things – the present state of Istanbul and its inhabitants; the current politics of Turkey; and the history of Turkey, especially Istanbul’s history. To the City is subtitled Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul. In his Prologue, Christie-Miller says  “This is a book about the old Byzantine land walls of Istanbul and the people who have lived around them, their history, and their endurance through an era of relentless change”.  He has an interesting and engaging way of presenting his case. He does not deal with one issue a time, but takes us around the ancient gates that encircle the old part of Istanbul. At each gate he talks with locals, then discusses politics, then enlightens us about Turkey’s history. So we go through The Tanners Gate, The Buried Gate, The Gate of the Saints, The Cannon Gate, The Gate of the Riven Tower…. and so forth up to The Rebuilt Gate, The Crooked Gate, The Gate of the Plagues and The Marble Tower which overlooks the Sea of Marmara, all fifteen of them.

            Rather than following Christie-Miller’s itinerary literally, I’ll simplify by breaking up his narrative, dealing one at a time with his three preoccupations.

First, the present state of Istanbul, which now has about 20,000,000 inhabitants. At The Tanners Gate, he notes that dogs [and to a lesser extent cats] run free in the streets near the walls, as they have always been looked after. Admiring this tradition, Christie-Miller joined in and for a couple of years volunteered at a dog shelter. There is still a sense of neighbourhood in the older quarters embracing many ethnicities, but it is rapidly being destroyed now. He speaks, at the Gate of Saints, with a man called Ismet who has been able to regain his house when developers flooded in, demolished houses and built luxury hotels beyond the reach of the poorer locals. Nevertheless there are still many tea-houses for the less well-off. Since it has been grown on a large scale in Turkey, tea has become Turkey’s most-consumed drink, overtaking coffee. Meanwhile, at other gates, we learn that when it comes to municipal plans, Kurds, Roma and members of the Alevi religion [a religion of its own, but with some Muslim tropes] are often moved on to other locations, thus once again breaking up long established neighbourhood and ensuring Muslim dominance. At The Gate of the Dervish Lodge, Christie-Miller hears parallel narratives of a young woman who maintained her religion, but was also addicted to heroin. Istanbul is now one of the major stops for drug-dealers bringing heroin from Asia to Europe and there is widespread addiction in the city. As at The Gate of Saints, the local communities at The Gate of the Dervish Lodge are now threatened with houses being demolished and increasingly, parents are forced to send their children to Islamic schools. At The Gate of the Spring, Christie-Miller talks with a Kurd who worked at the city’s major airport and discovered how callous the staff are in dealing with their workers. It is noted that to re-build Istanbul’s airport, much of the land taken destroyed square miles of forests and wild animals. The airport was opened in 2018. It did prosper, earned much money, and became a major hub between Asia and Europe… but many workers [probably in the hundreds] were killed in the construction. Then, at the Rebuilt Gate, we learn of another problem plaguing modern Istanbul. Obviously the city wants the ancient walls and fortresses to attract tourists and so some are “restored”. But the “restoration” often means cheap material, producing walls nothing like their original form, almost becoming Disneyfied.

All this might lead some readers to assume that Christie-Miller is reporting only negative things. After all, doesn’t every city in the world rebuild and demolish? But in many cases the re-builders of Istanbul are focused on destroying communities, driving out people of different ethnicities and ensuring that only expensive apartments become available. As for  Christie-Miller, he reports many happy things – the resilience of those who refused to be moved; the good spirits of so many people he had talked with or interviewed; the sense of solidarity, even if it was being attacked… and the tea houses. Poorer people are not tyrants and good for them.

Next, the ancient history of Istanbul – and note it is mainly ancient. At the Buried Gate, Christie-Miller comments on remains of the huge cannon that was ordered by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, who ultimately smashed his way into old Constantinople at the beginning of the 15^th century AD. At this point Christie-Miller gives a brief outline of the origins of the city and how it fared over the centuries. First there was a small port which was part of the Roman Empire. Then the Roman Emperor Constantine made it his capitol and it was given his name. Then the Roman Empire split into two, with one capitol in Rome and one in Constantinople. Then the “barbarians” gradually overtook Western Europe and the Western Roman Empire basically disappeared. Rome no longer had an emperor although the Catholic faith endured and spread. But Constantinople still regarded itself as the Roman Empire, though we now call it the Byzantine Empire. A major split of Christian faith came in the early 11^th century when pope and patriarch had different interpretations of the faith, and Constantinople no longer regarded the pope as their leader. Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic were now separate. Christie-Miller makes it clear that for a number of centuries, the Byzantine Empire was a major force, governing vast lands. But at the Golden Gate, Christie-Miller gives a very detailed account of the decline and fall of Constantinople and its empire. Gradually the Byzantines lost their territories as Arab Muslims from the south and Turks and Seljuks [who had converted to Islam] from the east pushed further and further into the Byzantine Empire until there was little more of it left than Constantinople itself. Constantinople had been overrun before (when marauding Crusaders ran riot through the city) and the Turks had twice failed to take the city as it was protected by its great walls and towers. But finally, in 1453, Mehmet II and his cannons broke in, massive slaughter followed, and old Constantinople was no more. In the West, the city was still called Constantinople until the 20^th century, when the city became universally know as Istanbul. At the Prophesied Gate, Christie-Miller gives a very detailed account of the tactics that were used by each side when the city was taken. And of course the Christian churches were converted into mosques, including the great Hagia Sophia which is now surrounded by Muslim minarets, and with its Christian icons and images now removed.

And so to what I think is Christie-Miller’s most important preoccupation -  the current politics of Turkey. In the early 20^th century, Turkey had lost much of its power, and was “the sick man of Europe”. In the First World War, Ottoman Turkey lost its hold on Arabia and the Middle East. Turkey’s rulers also understood that it had many Turkish citizens who were not ethnically Turks, some of whom [especially the Kurds] wanted to break away from Turkey. But, in the middle of the First World War, it was the Armenians who were targeted as “the enemy within”. Up to 1,500,000 Armenians were killed by the Turks in what is now understood to be a genocide. To this very day, Turks claim that this never happened – Erdogan insists that it never happened and journalists are forbidden to say otherwise. The era of the Ottomans was over in 1923 where a revolution, headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, turned Turkey into a republic. Ataturk insisted that the new state would be secular – that is, there would be no established religion, even if most of the country was Muslim. Among other things, the Hagia Sophia became a museum, no longer used as a mosque. Ataturk was, however, domineering in many ways. Indeed it was he who began the process of moving people away from long-established neighbourhoods in Istanbul, although not on the same scale as has happened in more recent times… and he had firm views on the minor ethnicities within Turkey. He died in 1938.

Turkey was neutral in the Second World War, but from the 1950s on, there were many tensions with regard to the minor ethnicities. At the Gate of the Spring, Christie-Miller talks to a Greek journalist who recalls the great pogrom in the 1950s, where thousands of Greeks were driven out of the country. In the Cold War, Turkey sided with the West, joining NATO and for some years allowing American nuclear missiles to be based in Turkey (they were removed in a deal when Khrushchev said he would remove his missiles from Cuba if the USA would remove theirs from Turkey). But there was much unrest in Turkey. There were clashes and riots between leftists and ultranationalists. Paramilitary forces were formed, assassinations brought down members of parliament, there was violence on a large scale. In 1980 there was a military coup d’etat and a period of huge repression – newspapers shut down, protests forbidden, radio and TV censored.

The most worrying problem remained the status of the minor ethnicities. The Kurds made up one fifth of the population, and wanted to create their own country. Some Kurdish activists modelled themselves on the Communists and formed their own party, the PKK. The violence of the PKK matched the violence of the Turkish army. Many people died. Christie-Miller’s narrative is seeded with stories he was told of the PKK’s threats. At the Cannon Gate, a young man who had been a primary school teacher told him that he had been driven out of his town by the threats of Kurdish activists.

 

Erdogan had been mayor of Istanbul before he became president. Turkey is on a tectonic plate, especially felt in Anatolia. There was a major earthquake in 1999, but the government was unable to help those who had suffered or lost their homes. Erdogan was severely criticised for his poor handling the situation, and there were once again major riots and protests. At first, the West endorsed Erdogan’s regime. He was the head of a secular state; he had adopted the neo-liberal code of a free market, the U.S.A. saw him as somebody who would be able to master a moderate form of Islam different from the more fanaticism of Islamism. Christie-Miller speaks with a man from Anatolia who saw his mother die painfully because there were limited hospitals to help in his region. He was delighted when Erdogan’s AS Party took power with its neo-liberalism and its promises of an improved health system. But his delight faded away as the Erdogan regime gradually moved in a different direction. In 2016, there was a failed coup against Erdogan. It was easily quelled and there were torture and death for those who had taken part. It had been inspired by the rival authoritarian Gulen Movement, which looked to a more enforced type of Islam. Bit by bit, Erdogan adopted a similar agenda. He encouraged Islamic schools which preached against secularism. Parents were encouraged to send their children to such schools, including the Alevi people who were not really Muslim. In 2020, now turning away from the secular state upon which the Turkish republic had been formed, Erdogan made the Hagia Sophia once again a mosque.

At the Gate of Plagues, Christie-Miller interviews many people who have suffered under the new authoritarian regime. Their complaints are many. During the months when Covid struck, young Islamist men were ostensibly made an auxiliary of the police, ensuring that Covid didn’t spread and people stayed inside. In fact they became bullies, beating up secular or non-Muslim people as they pleased. More people were pushed out of their locality and forced into inadequate small apartments. The huge drug-trade (especially heroin) could be seen on every corner. Nepotism determined who could or could not find places in the universities… and once again, when another major earthquake struck in 2023, Erdogan offered only very limited relief. Fittingly, the final chapter considers the foul pollution of the Sea of Marmara, which used to be teeming with edible fish but which now is a health hazard.

In his conclusion, Christie-Miller reverts to his account of the taking of the city of Constantinople by the Turks, but suggesting that modern Istanbul will one day collapse as old Constantinople did. The cycle of history does not allow great cities to last for ever. Turkey, in its many contradictions, on-going strife with large minority peoples, and severe authoritarianism, is increasingly unstable.

Is Christie-Miller a pessimist? Is he belittling Turkey and the Turks? Far from it. He knows the Turks intimately, has lived with many Turkish friends and has enjoyed their discussions and pastimes. He never belittles the way people live. But the current state of Turkish politics is ominous and the rolling-back of the secular state to favour Islamism is daunting.

A couple of footnotes:  First, when I taught in high-school, I sometimes guided a team to take part in the mock United Nations in which teenagers were assigned countries and debated as if they were diplomats. One year, the team I trained was assigned Turkey, so my team pronounced all the good things about Turkey… and that year, a nice Turkish woman from the Turkish consulate came to listen. I had a nice chat with her when the kids weren’t debating, but when I [foolishly] mentioned the Armenian genocide, she bristled and insisted that it had never happened. Some years later, a young Turkish man visited the school where I taught, and in the common room he began to argue [not with me] that the Armenian genocide had never happened. I prudently kept my mouth shut. The fact is, in Turkey now it is forbidden to face up to this atrocity, even though it happened over a century ago.

Second, when Erdogan in 2020 made the Hagia Sophia once again a mosque, he was basically doing what Putin has done. Here is Putin, atheist, former KGB man, who suddenly cuddles up to the Russian Orthodox Church, ostentatiously letting himself be seen at religious ceremonies, making the church a means of rebuilding the old Russian Empire. So too, Erdogan turns his back on the secular state because he sees that Islamism will help boost him. So on comes his ostentatious worship at the Hagia Sophia. And don’t get me started on Mr Modi in India who wants a Hindu-only country. How similar tyrants are.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“MEMED , MY HAWK” by Yashar Kemal [birth name Kemak Sadik Gokcell].  First published in Turkish in 1955 as Ince Memed ; translated into English by Edouard Roditi and published in 1961 as Memed, My Hawk

            Readers of this blog will be aware that my “Something Old’s” are often books that I take off my shelves and read because I have a very large library and too many books that I haven’t got around to reading. Some book-spines look at me reproachfully, asking me when I am going to read them. Case in point – Yashar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk has been looking at me sternly for decades. So recently I finally took off the shelf my paperback copy of Memed, My Hawk and read – with great pleasure as it happened, because it moves at a galloping pace. Also, of course, it was related to Turkey, and I had just finished reading Alexander Christie-Miller's account of modern Turkey To the City.

            I’ll reverse my standard habit of first giving you a detailed synopsis, and will instead deal first with the novel’s author. Yashar Kemal (1923-2015) was born in Anatolia, the central part of Turkey near the Taurus mountains. Unlike most Anatolians in the village where he grew up, his family were partly Kurdish by ancestry. As a result, in later life Kemal championed the idea that the Kurdish province should become an autonomous state. The Turkish government were angered by this and he was often threatened with jail or having his books supressed. His first two novels were confiscated and destroyed. For a couple of years he took refuge in Sweden. Some of Kemal’s grandparents had taken to banditry in the early part of the twentieth century, and bandits often became folk-heroes, lauded by the peasants for fighting against the oppressive landlords who ruled them. Yashar Kemal was very left-wing. For many years he was a member of the semi-legal Turkish Communist Party, but he resigned from the party in 1968 when the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia. He remained a fervent socialist. In all, he wrote 17 novels, many of them based on rural and folklore themes. But it was only Memed, My Hawk that gained international fame. On the basis of Memed, My Hawk, Kemal was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was passed over. Nevertheless, he received many international awards. Despite his criticisms of the Turkish government, when he died he was given what amounted to a state funeral and was officially praised as one of Turkey’s greatest writers. After reading his best-known novel Memed, My Hawk, I was surprised to discover the Kemal wrote three more novels about the bandit Memed, but they seem to have not gained the traction of the first Memed novel.

            So to the inevitable synopsis. Memed, My Hawk is set in the 1920s and 1930s, when Yashar Kemal would have been a little boy. Despite the fact that the Sultan and Ottomans had been overthrown in 1922 and Turkey was now a republic, the conditions for the peasants were still basically feudal. They were serfs. Landlords controlled vast swathes of land and had the right to tax and punish their serfs. The official police always sided with the landlords. In this context, bandits were the only force that could outfox the landlords and sometimes relieve the peasants – not that all bandits, hiding in the mountains, were so charitable. Some were just out for plunder.

The novel opens with Memed, a very young boy, running away from his master, the landlord Abdi Agha who controls five villages. Abdi Agha has regularly beaten the boy and forced him to do heavy work. The boy first appears to us covered in blood from the slashing thistles he has had to run through in his escape. Thistles become a motif in this novel, representing the barriers to progress. Memed is taken in by a sympathetic family and for a while recuperates and is able to work less strenuously as a goatherd. But Abdi Agha catches up with him, forces him back to day-long work in the fields, and punishes him by allowing him and his mother to have only starvation rations…. but some villagers surreptitiously feed them. There is at least some solidarity in the crowd.

Reaching adolescence, Memed falls in love with the girl Hatche and the feeling is mutual. The trouble is, Hatche is betrothed to Abdi Agha’s nephew. So Memed and Hatche decide to elope and run away to the mountains. But they are chased through the forest by Abdi Agha’s gang, including his angry nephew. Memed has firearms. He shoots and kills the nephew and just misses Abdi Agha, grazing him. But the landlord is able to capture Hatche and has her dragged back to the village where, by the perjury of some of the village, she is accused of having attempted to kill Abdi Agha and she is thrown into jail. Meanwhile Memed, who is still deeply in love with her, is now 18 years old.

Memed decides to join a bandit group in the mountains -  the gang of “Mad” Durdu, noted for his ruthlessness but also sometimes provisioning desperate peasants. At first Memed admires him, and joins him in a long [and detailed] battle with the pursuing police. Durdu seems invulnerable, managing to escape from any ambush. But Memed is disgusted when Durdu accepts food and hospitality from a nomadic tribe… and then proceeds to rob them at rifle-point of all their money, their clothes and their bedding. This is not a bandit who cares for the poor.

Memed  leaves Durdu’s band, joins up with two comrades, Jabbar and Sergeant Rejep, and now tries to act in the interests of the peasants… which means he will not hold up poor travellers who are in need,  but he will at last catch up with Abdi Agha and he will free Hatche. He makes a raid on Abdi Agha and believes he has killed Abdi Agha in a fire he has set… but he hasn’t. Abdi Agha goes for help to a far more powerful landlord than he, Ali Safa Bey, and now Memed is chased through the forest and mountains by police, Ali Safa Bey’s forces and the fickle. There are many skirmishes. He becomes legendary for his ability to escape capture. At one point, Memed is able to slip into his village of origin and advise the peasants that they should take over all the fields and burn down the thistle bushes that are hindering their agriculture. He is able at last to spring both Hatche and her mother from jail and finds an apparently impregnable hide-out in the highest mountains. When finally he is trapped, and after Hatche’s tragic death, Memed is able to talk his way out of it and make his case. Then he once again slips away and ends up as a legend.

Now stop being appalled, please. I know from my brief and inadequate synopsis, in which I have ignored many characters in the novel,  you may be thinking that this is merely an action story, more-or-less a Turkish cowboy tale. Not a bit of it. First, please note that Memed is a character who grows and develops. Yashar Kemal carefully presents him in a calculated sequence. First, the intimidated child. Then the adolescent who falls in love. Then the young man who can take on the responsibility of eloping. Then the fighter who becomes a bandit for the sake of being a bandit. Then developing a conscience and realising that the violence he uses has to have a purpose – benefitting other people, especially the down-trodden. Seen in this perspective, the novel has been interpreted as a Bildungsroman. At the same time, of course, Yashar Kemal is telling a socialist story. If the peasantry are not able to free themselves from servitude, then they have to be guided by some strong and charismatic person who can do extraordinary things – like Memed telling them to burn the thistle bushes and take over the land. The dominance of a charismatic leader has often led to misery in real history, but at least it takes a specific person to spark off a revolution. Note that in Memed, My Hawk we are often shown peasants who are fickle in their allegiance – sometimes admiring Memed and sometimes changing heart when the landlords persuade them. They need real guidance. This at least is Yashar Kemal’s collectivist idea.

At the same time, in writing about serfs and peasants Yashar Kemal deliberately uses a style, half epic and half folklore. The skirmishes and fights are presented as heroic, like Homer, like theThousand and One Nights, wherein Memed is sometimes able to shoot apparently endless ammunition, toss hand-grenades with ease. and when surrounded he can still escape. When he and Hatche and Hatche’s mother take refuge in a convenient cave on a snowy mountain, which has mats to sit on and a baby to nurse, we are in the land of fable. Yet, in the passages set in the villages, we have downright peasant dialogue, reminding me of such peasant novels as Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine or Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and many others. Novels of earthy things and painful things, regardless of the nation.

Just a few things to round off my chatter. First,  the novel’s title is not explained until very late in the novel, when an old man called Osman says that Memed reminds him of his faithful hawk, which never stole from people. He begins to call Memed “Memed , my hawk”, the sign of a righteous man. Second, in 1987 Peter Ustinov – best known in his comic roles – directed and performed in a film version of Memed, My Hawk with an all-English cast. It bombed and has been widely panned. Third, this matter of the word “peasant”. It seems to upset some people who think it is an insult. Rightly speaking “peasant” simply means a person who works the land but does not own it. Once, on this blog, I mentioned that the Red Army in the Second World War was largely made up of peasants. A reader rebuked me for using such a degrading word. He seemed to be even more annoyed when I pointed out that the U.S.S.R. proudly claimed its society was made up of three classes: Peasants, Workers and Intellectuals.

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                      TURNING HISTORY UPSIDE-DOWN

            When you read a novel set in the past, you can nearly always be sure that history will somehow be distorted – to a smaller or greater extent. When you see a film set in the past, ditto. But it is very rare for a novel or film to turn history completely upside-down, that is, to present what exactly did not happen.

            Let me give two New Zealand examples.

Back in 2017, a novel called The March of the Foxgloves was published. It was written by Karyn Hay. Most of it was set in New Zealand in the year 1893. Its main character was a very hedonistic woman who revelled in parties and free sex and who spouted ideas which, frankly, sounded more like one version of feminism in the 2010s rather than a woman of 1893. This is one of the great traps of supposedly “historical” novels – too often writers put into the mouths of their characters concepts that are anachronistic. As the story went, the hedonistic, partying woman wanted liberation. A great petition was being circulated asking for women’s suffrage, but the hedonist could not sign it because she was not a New Zealand citizen. By chance her landlady was a crabby, puritanical church-going woman who hated alcohol, disapproved of wild partying and certainly did not approve of the new-fangled petition. So bravely the hedonist crept out and signed the petition in her landlady’s name… and women won the suffrage that year.

Which of course brings up the completely upside-down version of history. There might have been a [very] few pleasure-seeking women who signed the petition, but as I wrote when I reviewed this novel for Landfall-on-Line “the backbone of the New Zealand women’s suffrage movement was an organisation of church-going Protestant ladies called the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The main impulse of the WCTU (including Kate Sheppard) was to give women the political power to oppose the demon drink and other such filthy male habits. In other words the likes of [the novel’s landlady] would have been the very people who signed the suffrage petition enthusiastically and helped the WCTU with its campaigning.” So the novel turns history upside-down.

More recently, I saw a film that encouraged another major fib. This was the film We Were Dangerous which I could criticise in many ways. It is supposedly set in 1954 on an off-shore New Zealand island dedicated to the rehabilitation of delinquent girls. I’ll skip over the film’s unreal, neatly brushed-up delinquent girls, who all look as if they come from polite middle-class homes and from a hairdresser. The film seems to be inspired by recent revelations about the abuse of children, adolescents and others in care in both state and faith-based institutions. The domineering woman in charge of this off-shore jail is apparently either a Catholic nun or a former nun – there is a brief flashback of her attacking another nun. Apparently the only lessons she teaches are religious and Biblical lessons. We do not see the girls having any other sorts of classroom instruction. All this is improbable.

But where it literally turns into the reverse of historical reality, we have a doctor coming to the prison and persuading the nun that she should understand the benefits of eugenics. For those of you who have forgotten, eugenics was the malign movement in the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, which sought to have only perfectly-formed people. Others should not be allowed to exist. The chronically ill, the deformed, the lame, the mentally impaired and the feeble-minded should be either sterilised or disposed of in some other way. This movement was not a small cult. It was mainstream – doctors and public figures went along with eugenics and thousands were (unwillingly) sterilised in European countries, the U.S.A. , Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Doctors knew what was right, didn’t they? It was only when Nazi Germany took eugenics a little step further – not only sterilising the feeble and ill, but also killing them -  that gradually eugenics lost its lustre.

So how is all this related to the film We Were Dangerous? The domineering nun goes along with the doctor in having a girl sterilised. To make it clear, there is a shot of the doctor coming out of the make-do surgery with blood on his apron, after the girl has been howling off screen. At which point I have to note that if there was one organisation that was fervently opposed to eugenics it was the Catholic church. Any bishop, priest, sister or nun would have regarded eugenics as sinful, and preached thus. Now it could be that in this film the domineering woman was not meant to be a real nun. After all, she doesn’t wear a nun’s habit. But all the iconography in her classroom is clearly Catholic – crucifixes, holy pictures etc. – which can only make viewers see her as a nun. Casting a nun as a champion of eugenics is as ridiculous as believing that hedonistic women won women’s suffrage.

Footnote: If you have the time, look up on-line the “Black Sheep” series. It includes an episode called “Eugenics: the story of a bad idea” which deals with how eugenics affected New Zealand. It shows how, right up to the 1950s, doctors still sterilised women who were regarded as delinquent or were feeble minded. Some women were sterilised on the premise that they were just being injected to stabilise their periods. Only at the end, the podcast briefly mentions that some people stood against eugenics – the nun Mother Aubert and some members of the young Labour Party who understood that sterilisation was often targeted at working-class women. BTW, this posting is not an apologia for the Catholic church. Like state and other and religious denominations, some Catholic institutions were guilty of  abuse in care.

 

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“TO FREE THE WORLD – Harry Holland ”  by James Robb (Steele Roberts, $50)  

[The full title of To Free the World is To Free the World – Harry Holland and the rise of the labour movement in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific]

 

There is no doubt that Henry Edmund (“Harry”) Holland was a formidable figure in both Australian and New Zealand politics, finally becoming the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. A fervent socialist, he championed many things that are now taken for granted. Holland died two years before the Labour Party first came into power in 1935, and while some reviled him (even in his own party), many have speculated that he could have been an astute Prime Minister. James Robb writes from a very socialist viewpoint, meaning there is a certain bias. But this is not a major flaw, given that all biographies are written from a certain point of view. Only very, very rarely does one find a biographer who is entirely impartial. So a socialist biography it is. To Free the World is a very detailed biography taking Holland (born 1868 – died 1933) from cradle to grave, and illustrated with many photographs and other images. After 425 pages of text there are over fifty pages of notes, sources and index. This is a very thorough work and I admit that it took me the best part of a week to read.

Holland was born in the hinterland of New South Wales. His parents were religious and as a young man Holland was a member of the Salvation Army. Although in young manhood he parted with organised religion, he always regarded himself as a non-denomination Christian. Some credited him which having learnt how to be an orator from his street-corner speeches when he was in the Sallies [or Salvos as the Aussies say]. When he was twenty he married his life-long spouse Annie and they were to have three boys and five girls. James Robb mentions Holland’s family only very occasionally, being more focussed on causes and politics which absorbed Holland. Holland’s left-tendency was first influenced by such Utopian works as Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Back. He trained as a type-setter which was to be important in that he himself was later to set up and run various socialist newspapers and broadsheets.

In the 1890s Australia was suffering a severe economic depression which lead to the rise of radical socialism. There were riots over workers’ wages and the conditions in which they had to work, not to mention an economy in which prices made it difficult for workers to feed their families. Such unions as there were engaged in strikes, but there were many different types of socialism. The big rift in Australian socialism, which was to last for decades, was the rift between socialists who called for direct unionist action including strikes; and socialists who said that they should seek to win power by becoming a political party and entering parliament. The SFA (Socialist Federation of Australasia) was torn apart. Says James Robb - in very socialist terms - “The political separation between the class-struggle socialists and the class-collaborationist Labor Party was complete.” (p.55) Billy Hughes and William Holman became the best-known members of the parliamentary Labor Party, regarded by Holland and others as traitors to the socialist cause. There were many matters that concerned Australian socialists. Most opposed the separate states becoming, in 1901, the federation of Australia. At the same time the Socialist League and most unions endorsed the “White Australia” policy [which was abolished only in the 1960s] when unions feared that Asian workers would undercut them by accepting shorter wages.

Harry Holland was by now well-known for his lectures, his street oratory, and the radical socialist newspapers he published such as “The Socialist” and later “The International Socialist”. Like many of his comrades, he hailed the [abortive] 1905 Russian Revolution, believing it could create a genuinely democratic worker’s state once the autocratic Tsar was gone.

The biggest test for Australian socialists came in 1909, with first a strike on a large scale, then a lock-out, at the Broken Hill mine and in the coal-fields in northern New South Wales. There was a major stand-off, pitting unionists against armed police and “scabs”. The English socialist Tom Mann spoke about the exploitation of workers and was prosecuted for sedition. So was Holland, who was jailed for five months. Billy Hughes, now head of the Parliamentary Labor Party, managed to break up the striking unionists. In the federal elections of 1910, it was Billy Hughes’s party which made great gains in parliament, while the Socialist Federation of Australasia got nowhere. Holland wrote in 1910 “The great majority of the workers here are not prepared to accept the revolutionary working-class objective and tactics which mark the fighting of the workers’ movements in other counties. By more than 20 to 1 in West Sydney the Socialist candidate was turned down in favour of middle-class interests as represented by the Labor party… the only explanation is that the workers of Australia are as yet economically uneducated – as yet so unconscious of their class position and interests as to be easily tossed along in the whirlwind of political happenings.” ( quoted p.101) The fact is that increasingly many unionists were suggesting it would be wise to vote for the parliamentary Labor party even if they did not endorse all their policies. [Probably to Holland’s chagrin, the “ traitor” Billy Hughes went on to be Australia’s prime minister from 1915 to 1923.]

Holland now made it his business to write and lecture about accidents and lethal conditions that crippled many workers in factories. At about the same time, he himself suffered with knee problems. Although he had surgery, he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

His next fervent crusade was to oppose Australia’s Compulsory Military Act, which conscripted young men to take part in military drill and prepare for war. Holland wasn’t a thorough pacifist, but in the years before the First World War, he saw wars as the work of capitalists and imperialists who wanted to grab land and resources. War, in his view, was designed to crush the proletariat. When one of his sons was called up, Holland banned him from joining military drill. He was prosecuted and fined. 

 

                                                           Harry Holand in 1920

And it is at this point that To Free the World moves its narrative to New Zealand. There was a growing Socialist Party in New Zealand, and Harry Holland was invited to come over and deliver socialist lectures. Holland was 43 when he first landed in New Zealand in 1912 and walked straight into the issue of the day - the major strike at the gold-mining town Waihi. Under the New Zealand Liberal party, an Arbitration and Conciliation system had been set up to deal with worker’s grievances and determine what were fair wages. This system appeared to work well. There were no strikes for twelve years. But gradually the awards given by Arbitration failed to keep up with the rising cost of living. Holland, still favouring direct workers’ action, wrote that the arbitration system was Labour’s “Leg-iron”, and said workers should “strive for our revolutionary objective: the overthrow of capitalism, the uprearing of the Socialist Republic. So organised – and with our organisation built on a solid foundation of working-class knowledge – with no divisions of race or creed, colour or sex, we might well laugh our exploiters to scorn, smash through the awards and penalties of their Arbitration Courts, tear down the superstructure if their legal power to oppress, and swiftly plant the Red Flag… on the world’s citadel of industrialism.” [quoted p. 154]

At this time Bill Massey’s Reform party was building in strength, mostly focussed on the farming sector and more conservative than the ailing Liberal party. There was the strike at the Blackball coal mine. Socialists set up the Federation of Labour (later nicknamed the “Red Feds”), some of their leaders having, like Harry Holland, come from Australia – Bob Semple, Paddy Webb etc. And then there was the major strike at Waihi. The striking workers were driven out of town, the police used force (one striker was killed) and what the strikers called “scabs” took their place. Holland wrote a book about the tragedy of Waihi which was reprinted a number of times and had a wide readership. After the breaking of the Waihi strike, Holland remained steadfastly militant, suggesting that workers should “along the lines of the [American] IWW [“Wobblies”] … fight uncompromisingly, with never a section of workers scabbing on any other section, together with unity in the political field, in one big revolutionary socialist political party.” [p.170] James Robb says that after the formation of the Red Feds “the achievement of the One Big Union, and of the one big revolutionary Socialist Party, was to be Holland’s chief preoccupation for the remainder of his life, and in the next few years in New Zealand its achievement would appear to him to come tantalisingly close.” [p. 154] But in 1913 there was the coordinated strike on the waterfronts of New Zealand’s major cities, with exports and imports being held up. This was too much for the farmers [whom the socialists had tended to overlook] and the strikes were broken up, in part by farmers on horseback nicknamed “Massey’s Cossacks” by the strikers and their allies. Socialists who had supported the strike in speeches and pamphlets were prosecuted for sedition. Peter Fraser and Bob Semple were jailed. Holland offer a detailed defence, but Robert Stout gave him 12 months.

There was another problem that worried him. A major war seemed to be coming, and like Australia, New Zealand now had a Defence Act. Holland saw this as sheer militarism because it included compulsory military service. Holland had believed idealistically that the workers of the world would not go to war against their fellow proletarians. For years he had touted the German Social Democratic Party as the model for any socialist party… so he had a rude awakening when, at the beginning of the First World War, the GSDP joined all other German parties and voted for war. Painfully he came to understand that even in New Zealand, for most of the proletariat, patriotism trumped socialism. There was a plan for all parties to join together for the duration of the war. The Liberal and Reform parties united and formed a combined cabinet headed by Massey (Reform) and Joseph Ward (Liberal); but the socialists stood aloof. In 1916, the New Zealand Labour Party was formed, welcoming nearly all socialist factions. In 1918 Holland, Bob Semple and Peter Fraser entered parliament and Holland became the leader of the party, a role he kept up to his death. Later, there were six Labour MP’s and by 1920 there were nine. Perhaps ruefully, James Robb tells us “The waning of the class struggle movement after 1919 was as rapid as its rise.” (p.281) Later he says “By the time of the 1922 general election, the course of Holland, Fraser, Semple, Parry, Hickey, Webb, Savage and all the other former Red Fed class-struggle leaders accepting the framework of capitalist electoral politics had become irreversible.” (pp. 304-305) Holland clung to many of his radical ideas, believing that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution would herald a new era of proletarian freedom… or if not them, then the botched uprisings in Germany after the First World War. But the fact was he was now a respectable parliamentarian leading a respectable party, even if radical words were sometimes spoken. Naturally the tiny New Zealand Communist Party accused the Labour Party of not being truly socialist.

 

The nine Labour members of Parliament in 1922. Harry Holland seated 2nd from left. Peter Fraser next to him and Michael Joseph Savage at the end of the top row.

            In the 1920s, as well as steering a parliamentary socialist party, Holland can be credited with championing two major causes.

Near the end of the First World War there was formed in New Zealand a Protestant Political Association which preached that all the ills in the nation could be blamed on Catholics. The major non-Catholic denominations (Anglicans, Presbyterians) thought this was nonsense, but the PPA gained traction from the smaller and more marginal churches, had influence with some MPs, and managed to stir up much bigotry. Holland frequently spoke against this and made it clear that the Labour Party welcomed people of any religion or no religion, men or women, Maori or Pakeha. The PPA faded away by the early 1930s.

More momentously, Holland (and his party) condemned the way New Zealand officials were treating the Samoan people. The League of Nations had “Mandated” Western Samoa to New Zealand but Samoa was being treated like a colony. The Mau, a Samoan party seeking independence, was formed and made peaceful demonstrations. They pledged to use no violence. But the occupying forces did use violence, finally shooting into a crowd and killing protestors. It wasn’t only these events that Holland saw as an outrage, but also the dishonest way official dispatches and newspapers reported the situation. He spoke frequently about this in public and in parliament. Regrettably, his campaign fell on deaf ears. Samoa continued to be controlled by New Zealand until 1961.

As he reaches the later years of Holland’s life, James Robb reminds us that Holland did have interests outside current politics. He read poetry and wrote verses of his own. He wrote a book about Scotland’s most esteemed poet Robert Burns… but of course he admired Burns in part because he was  a revolutionary and a radical.

By the 1930s, some members of the Labour Party began to see Holland as past his prime, and thought that a new leader was needed for the parliamentary party. The discussion didn’t last for long, however. Holland died of a heart attack in October 1933 while attending the funeral of an old friend , the Maori King, Kingi Te Rata Mahuta. The Labour Party became the government in 1935 and remained there until 1949, first under Michael Joseph Savage then under Peter Fraser. James Robb speculates that, had he survived to be prime-minister, “There can be little doubt that as a leader of a Labour government, Holland would have pursued a course much like that of Savage and Fraser in leading the working class into World War II – albeit perhaps with deep personal regret.” (p. 381) I myself speculate here that the “regret” Robb refers to is the fact that socialists who had opposed going to war in 1914 and been jailed for it (Bob Semple etc.) were only too eager to fight a war in 1939. Remember Michael Joseph Savage was the first prime-minister, in what was then still the British Empire, to pledge allegiance to Britain once war broke out. Fighting a war with Hitler was different from fighting the Kaiser.

In his last chapter, before he comes to appendices, notes and index, Robb criticises other writers who have written more negative biographies of Harry Holland than To Free the World . As I have not read these other biographies I cannot pass judgment on them. Robb writes clearly, his socialist views are honest ones, the book is thorough and the images are a great help. I can, however, dissent on one thing – although Robb doesn’t say it, it is clear to me that in the end Holland backed away from his original fire-brand variety of socialism, and came to understand that the parliamentary way was both more efficient and more genuinely democratic. And after all, in a generally stable society, who wants a revolution?

Footnote: In case you were wondering, I was not misspelling the Australian Labor Party as opposed to the New Zealand Labour Party. That is how the Aussies spell it.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “OLD NEW ZEALAND – A Tale of the Good Old Times” by “A Pakeha Maori” [F. E. Maning] (first published in 1863)

 

            In the 1960s, the publishers Wilson and Horton (then proprietors if the New Zealand Herald) printed a series of facsimiles of New Zealand books that had first been published in the 19^th century. I have seven of these facsimiles sitting on my shelves. They are very interesting at least because they show what attitudes European (British) writers had when it came to Maori. Some of these books would not be criticised now, but some display very dated or even bigoted ideas about race. One book in particular is well known, F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand – A Tale of the Good Old Times.

Fredrick Edward Maning (1812-1883) was a Protestant Irishman who was a robust man very happy to fight and brawl when it suited him. He was apparently 6 feet 3 inches tall. In 1833, Maning came over to New Zealand from Tasmania and set himself up as a trader in Hokianga, the north of New Zealand. He lived with the Ngapui iwi, married a Maori woman (the sister of a chief) and had four children by her. He also, apparently, sometimes joined Ngapui war parties fighting other iwi. Years later he became a judge of the Native Land Court, but in his early years he was known to have clashed with British laws. He opposed the Treaty of Waitangi and formal colonisation of New Zealand. In his brief Preface to Old New Zealand, Maning says he “thought it might be worthwhile to place a few sketches of old Maori life before the remembrance of them had passed away.” He adds “I first saw them as they were still unlike a civilised people of British subjects”. Remember, Maning wrote his book in the 1860s. When he referred to “ the good old times” he was referring to the 1830s, before the Treaty of Waitangi existed. The 1830s were not all that far away from the 1860s. Old New Zealand was a very popular book and was reprinted many times in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. But by the late 20^th century, it was being criticised by historians. In 1975, the historian Professor M. P. K. Sorrenson wrote an essay (ironically called “How to Civilise Savages”) in which he said that Old New Zealand had “undeservedly become a local classic”. More recently Maori writers have criticised the book.

I finally got around to reading Old New Zealand this year, and here is how I see it. [Page numbers given according to the original facsimile.] Maning does not write about events in sequence. His narrative – such as it is – jumps hither and thither. He has the maddening habit of not giving dates and not giving names of the people he meets and works with. Although he is a “trader” he never specifies what he trades in.  He often attempts to be jocular (and sometimes succeeds) but his attempts at oratory are flat. Take the gushy words with which he opens his book: “Ah! those good old times, when first I came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this, now. The very sun does not seem to me to shine as bright as it used. Pigs and potatoes have degenerated; and every thing seems ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable’. But those were the times! – ‘the good old times’ – before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that. When every one did as he liked – except when his neighbours would not let him, (the more shame for them) – when there were no taxes, or duties, or public works, who public to require them…” and so on (Chapter I, pp,1-2)

In all of his narrative, such as it is, we have to remember that in the 1830s, Maori tended to welcome Pakeha, this being long before Pakeha became the majority population. Maori rangatira looked forward to getting iron ploughs, knives, axes, European clothing and, of course, firearms – muskets and tupara (double-barrelled shotguns). For this reason, many Pakeha traders were held in high esteem and were protected by rangatira.

 

Maning begins (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) with a not-particularly-hilarious account of how he first stepped foot on Hokianga. He notes Maori took goods without paying for them and were particularly interested in the tupara. The chief welcomes Maning as “his” Pakeha. Maning speaks of how one senior of the iwi is a fine fellow who revels in the fact that, when he was younger, he ate many people. Yes, cannibalism was still practiced in some parts of Aotearoa and Maning  appears to find this fact amusing. After wrestling with a Maori champion, he says: “My vis-à-vis in the operation [of bringing goods to shore] was a respectable old warrior of great experience and approved valour, whose name being turned into English meant ‘the eater of his own relations’… This was quite a different diet from ‘melons’, and he did not bear his name for nothing… I will only say that my comrade was a most bloodthirsty, ferocious, athletic savage, and his character was depicted in every line of his tattooed face.” (Chapter 3, pp,41-42) He makes it clear that there was a big trade on the selling of [Maori] heads, who have been killed and cured by Maori and sold to traders. “The skippers of many of the colonial trading schooners were always ready to deal with a man who had ‘a real good head’, and used to commission such men as my companion of the morning to ‘pick up heads’ for them. It is a positive fact that some time after this the head of a live man was sold and paid for beforehand, and afterwards honestly delivered ‘as per arrangement’ ”  (Chapter 3, p.63)

There are still “small” wars between iwi and some against British settlers. He says (Chapter 4) a renegade, and members of the team that help him ashore, made a raid against one settlement and were driven away by cannon fire. He builds a modest house for himself (Chapter 5), but of course has to pay, in axes, muskets etc., to competing people who claim his plot of land is theirs. At which point, delving into the future, he curses official Land Commissioners who, years later, make him prove that he acquired his plot legitimately. He freely admits (Chapter 6) that he has Maori “retainers” and servants whom he pays. And naturally he loves to spin sensational tales even if they are true, as in the following: “He killed several men in fair fight, and had also – as was well known – committed two most diabolical murders, one of which was on his own wife, a fine young woman, whose brains he blew out at half a second’s notice for no further provocation than this: - he was sitting on the verandah of his house, and told her to bring a light for his pipe. She, being occupied in domestic affairs, said ‘Can’t you fetch it yourself, I am going for water’. She had the calibash in her hand and their infant child on her back. He snatched up his gun and instantly shot her dead on the spot; and I have heard hm afterwards describing quite coolly the comical way in which her brains had been knocked out by the shot with which the gun was loaded. He also had, for some trifling provocation, lopped off the arms of his own brother or cousin. I forget which, and was altogether, from his tremendous bodily strength and utter insensibility to danger, about as ‘ugly a customer’ as one would care to meet.” (Chapter 6, pp. 89-90). This is very much as in the tone of his boastful tale of wrestling with a formidable Maori warrior and catching a tomahawk thrown at him by the said warrior (Chapter 6, pp. 92-93)

Often he emphasises that Maori crave for European tools because they had previously had to work with more primitive tools which made for very laborious toil thus: “As for the Maori people in general, they are neither so good or so bad as their friends and enemies have painted them, and I suspect are pretty much what almost every other people would have become, if subjected for ages to the same external circumstances. For ages they have struggles against necessity in all its shapes. This has given them a remarkable greediness for gain in every visible and immediate tangible form. It has even left its mark on their language. Without the aid of iron the most trifling tool or utensil could only be purchased by an enormously disproportionate outlay of labour in its construction, and, in consequence, became precious to a degree scarcely conceivable by people of civilised and wealthy countries. This great value attached to personal property of all kinds, increased proportionately the temptation to plunder; and where no law existed, or could exist, of  sufficient force to repress the inclination, every man, as a natural consequence, became a soldier, if it were only for the defence of his own property and that of those who were banded with him – his tribe, or family….”                             (Chapter 6, pp. 99-100)

From Chapters 7 on, he discusses what he sees as traditional Maori codes and laws that were almost universally respected. Muru (Chapter 7) is regarded by Pakeha as sheer robbery or plunder, but Maning suggests muru was really a means of dividing up goods equitably, often under the pretext of punishing somebody who owned too much. But in Maning’s time it is rarely used. Tapu (Chapter 8) however is quite different, still widely used as a means of keeping order. A tohunga really could, by his mana, stop people in their tracks by declaring a person or thing was tapu. Maning tells a tale of how he himself was chastised by a tohunga when he accidentally slept in a hill where the bones of an earlier tohunga were buried. He says he was put through a long ceremony by the tohunga in which he was divested of all his clothes and kitchen utensils. He also notes (Chapter 9) that a tohunga was in effect a soothsayer, claiming to be able the predict the future. Maning says this was very much the same technique the ancient Greeks used – giving a prediction that was ambiguous enough to mean almost anything. One tohunga (Chapter 10) was credited with raising up the dead. In what is, oddly, one of Maning’s best anecdotes, he tells the story of a botched such “resurrection” which ended in tragedy. There is still some fear of the taniwha (Chapter 11) and other cases of the use of tapu.

In Chapters 12 and 13, he speculates what Maori warfare was like, prior to the entry of firearms. He regards most of them had been real but on a small scale. He speculates on why so many earth fortifications had been abandoned by iwi and concludes that the nature of war has changed since muskets came along. Muskets massively depleted Maori numbers [he doesn’t use the term, but he is here referring to what some historians now call the Musket Wars]. Later he also suggests that another factor was the introduction of European diseases. In his own time he has seen iwi becoming fewer and fewer… He circles us back to his first chapters, reminding us that “A chief possessing a pakeha was much envied by his neighbours, who, in consequence, took every opportunity of scandalising him and blaming him for any rough plucking process he might submit the said pakeha to;… pakehas being, in those glorious times, considered to be geese who laid golden eggs, and it would beheld to be the very extreme of foolishness and bad policy to kill them, or, by too rough handling, to cause them to fly away.” (Chapter 13 p. 184) And in Chapter 14 he moves into different territory by telling us abput an old warrior, a Rangatira who lamented the days of the spear and axe and mere that had been taken over by the muskets. When the old warrior dies, two old women of his age hang themselves.

And then (Chapter 15) Maning proceeds to tell us the meaning of a number of Maori words. He intends to write a Maori lexicon. He asserts how difficult it is to explain many Maori words, and declares “It will be a tough word [a Maori word with many nuances which he has been analysing] disposed of to my hand, when I come to write my Maori dictionary, in a hundred volumes, which, if I begin soon, I hope to have finished before the Maori is a dead language.”  (Chapter 15 p. 224)

As I said at the beginning of this review, Old New Zealand jumps all over the place “hither and thither”. Maning is by no means a stylist and his book often has odd absents. Though he was a “Pakeha Maori”, he never mentions the many British he would have met in the 1830s. He overlooks such things as Maori crafts, Maori forms of marriage, and major Maori people who took important roles in iwi. Also there is that element of boastfulness (his skill as a wrestler etc.). Sometimes, too, there are statements that we could now regard as patronising. Consider this, written with regard to Maori: “for our own safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions, new habits of life, new ideas, sentiments and information, - whom we must either civilise or by our mere contact exterminate.”(Chapter 6, pp. 99-102) The last word might seem shocking – though it is not suggesting genocide, but rather that contact with Pakeha is dangerous. Like it or not, distasteful though some people will now find it, much [perhaps most] of what Maning writes about Maori customs are true and provable. Not a great book, but still one worth reading as a primer.

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

           THERE NEVER WAS A PARADISE

            No race, ethnicity, nation, people, tribe or human group is free of gross flaws, bad behaviour, violence and what could reasonably be called sin. Poor Rousseau and others of his naïve ilk thought that somewhere in the world there were “noble savages” with better moral codes that Europeans had. There weren’t… and let us remember that Rousseau had never visited the lands he thought were blessed.

In saying this I am not damning all individual people in the world. Yes, there have been decent, thoughtful and even pacifistic people in the world, but all such have existed in environments where there was the potential for violence and where violence often broke out. Every large group of people in the world has at some time been aggressive and violent. I say this because there is a tendency nowadays – especially in the USA and among “woke” people everywhere - to believe that only European colonisers ever caused havoc, up-ended societies or attempted committing genocide.

This is both ridiculous and untrue.

Search the history of any country in the world and you will find wars, coups, attempts to expunge foreign peoples etc. Shaka Zulu attempted to wipe out all other tribes in Southern Africa; African tribes further north were frequently at war with their neighbours; some tribes were perfectly happy to round up their enemies and sell them to European slave-traders. Indigenous American tribes  (so-called “Indians”) fought wars with other tribes before Europeans arrived and started fighting them and taking their land. Taking slaves after defeating enemies was common in Aztec, Inca and (to a lesser degree) Mayan culture. Mohammed’s forces fought those who did not accept their religion and, under the name of jihad, rampaged through northern Africa enforcing their order at pain of death.  Over the many centuries, China expanded by war, fighting with Mongols, expropriating foreign land [e.g. Tibet] and destroying many cultures. India, made of many different states [and languages], expanded through war. Japan had a refined code of warfare; and they used it. Over the centuries, people in all parts of the world overtook and destroyed other cultures. And please note I include European peoples in this endless tale.

            But what I am often now aware of is the tendency of some apologists to pretend that, before large scale European colonisation began, the world was idyllic… and if this can’t be proved, then there will be apologists to say there were reasons for violence by the indigenes.

            I have recently finished reading F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand, his account of relating with Maori in the 1830s, a book that is now much contested. The day after I finished reading it, while taking my morning walk, I happened to listen though my earplugs to a New Zealand podcast in the “Black Sheep” series. It was about Hongi Hika. This ferocious and skilful warrior triggered off what are now called the Musket Wars. 20,000 Maori were killed by his forces and his enemies. This was the most lethal war that Aotearoa / New Zealand ever suffered. The number killed was greater than New Zealand deaths in the First and the Second World Wars (and far, far more deaths than in the “New Zealand Wars” in the 1860s). There is no doubt that those Pakeha who traded in firearms were partly to blame. But, after all, it was Hongi Hika and the Ngapuhi who mustered troops and ravaged the northern part of the North Island, killing and despoiling those who lived in what it now Auckland.

            What I found interesting (and a little questionable) was the way two people in the pod cast – the historian Paul Moon and a distant descendant of Hongi Hika – both acknowledged the carnage made by Hongi Hika, but both also found excuses for Hongi Hika’s deadly rampage. It was the fault of the traders with muskets [partly true]. There was a tradition of much smaller “wars”, often involving very few Maori warriors, before Europeans brought in the means of expanding war. Hongi Hika was a great diplomat when he visited England, looked carefully at the nature of  the British army and how it was used, and helped Professor Lee to create a Maori lexicon etc. etc.  But meritorious though this may sound, it was still Hongi Hika himself who unleashed warfare in a grand and deadly way. The carnage was his… and the warrior tradition was already is place long before Pakeha came along.

            If you tell me that Maori land was stolen on a grand scale by the British; if you say there were cruel attempts to wipe out the Maori language; if you note that poverty in New Zealand is still worse for Maori and Pasifika than for most Pakeha, then I would whole-heartedly agree with you. If you point out that Europeans waged deadly wars on a large scale and stole many lands, I would also agree. But if you believe the rest of the world was perfect, peaceful, just and harmonious before Europeans came, then I would say you’re deluding yourself.  

Don’t pretend there was once a peaceful paradise. There never was.