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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

A Walking Stick for an Old Man

A Walking Stick for an Old Man

1.

In the Maori area I move like a blind man, heavily and slowly. A Maori friend has to be my tokotoko. I rest my hand on his shoulder and he leads me through the dark.

C—, who was a leader of the Mongrels in Palmerston and Hastings, made me a tokotoko the other day. ‘There you are, old man,’ he said. In this way perhaps he signified that he regarded me as his koro. I value the gift. He decorated it by cutting away the bark so that there were alternate bands of bark and clean wood. I bought a rubber ferrule for it, to keep the end from spreading.

C— tells me that if the Jerusalem ‘family’ breaks up, he may go back to the Mongrels. They are re-tribalising in the towns. And the broken tribes are filling the jails.

2.

Until they shovel the sods over me, my anger will never die, on behalf of those who are having the Maoritanga squeezed out of them drop by drop, as a man squeezes a lemon. It is not wise to speak loosely of integration. So far ‘integration’ has meant a ruthless and inexorable assimilation. How could those who are themselves slaves (slaves of money, slaves of their fears, slaves of a hundred bosses) ensure that free people should remain in this country. The only free people I have ever seen are in the Maori pas.

Tame Hemahema asked me once if I would like some potatoes for the winter.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He led me up behind the houses and showed me a field of undug potatoes. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘They’re yours if you like to dig them up.’

It was the magnificent gift of a free man. Hemahema was not affluent. But all the time I knew him he held his head up with the strength of a man nobody could buy.

3.

The Maori had slaves. But one has to grasp that in the majority culture all are slaves. Fear of the loss of material security turns them into slaves. In the majority culture people themselves become commodities.

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Slavery can be a subtle matter. There are ten thousand different ways of licking a boss’s arse to keep a job. All of them have the same effect. They leave you with the taste of shit in your mouth.

4.

Where I sit now, I can hear the sound from the radiogram thundering through the house. My son and his friends are listening. ‘I don’t understand,’ the singer shouts. His song numbs the brain.

‘It’s a long way from anywhere,’ he continues. He is singing for dollars. The bosses of the majority culture will never worry much about these songs, though they have a rebel tinge, just as they will never actually get rid of the traffic in drugs. Songs and drugs both earn dollars for somebody. And the rebellion of those who listen to the songs, or those who jab a needle in their arm, does not frighten the bosses. It does not challenge their dollar-earning structure. It provides a bog in which the rebels can sink out of sight.

5.

My own style of life is militant in a low key. In our kind of culture it is militant to choose to have no money, to have bare feet, to leave your hair uncut. It is militant to go on a twenty-five day fast when you can’t get a cheap house from the city authorities for vagrants who are put in jail for not having jobs.

The liberals always mistake me for one of themselves. They think I want to work for change by legislation, by petitions, by group discussion. This is not the case. It is as much militancy to fast as to plant a bomb in a courtroom. Nobody will ever stop pakeha warders kicking Maori prisoners in the head by liberal means. Liberalism is a fog in which we lose the ability to distinguish friend from foe. But with militancy the mind becomes lucid and group morale rises. Body and mind are joined together again.

6.

When my son Hoani was seventeen the cops and the magistrates planted him in Waikeria borstal for three months for being in a flat where another boy had some drugs. The other boy pleaded guilty and got a hundred and fifty dollar fine. Hoani pleaded not guilty and got a three months sentence. He spent the three months in solitary confinement because he appealed against the sentence, and so was on remand, and so was not taken out to work.

It would have been a trap for me to waste my time complaining about the injustice of my son’s sentence. Hoani is a militant. The cops and the magistrates could sense this. Injustice towards the militant is an inherent part of the legal and the social structure. The liberal approach would have reduced me to a state of exhausted frustration.

My wife Te Kare said to me, ‘Why don’t you visit our son in Waikeria?’

‘You visit him,’ I said, ‘and give him his father’s love. I have to build a canoe for him to climb into when he comes out.’

The letters he wrote to me from jail contained a point by point programme page 504 for me to use in building up the community at Hiruharama. I tried it out and found it wholly effective.

When Hoani came out of jail I met him in a flat in Auckland. ‘Well, they’ve not cut your hair or made you work,’ I said. ‘You can hold your head up.’

‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ he said. Then he lay down on a bed and looked at the ceiling for half an hour. But before I left the flat he took a greenstone pendant off his neck and put it round my neck. ‘This is nearly four hundred years old,’ he said. ‘The atua of my mother’s tribe go with it. They’ll look after you when you go north among the Ngapuhi.’ The strongest aroha is shown by the gift of greenstone.

My son Hoani is a toa. If they had made him bow his head in jail, he would have become stupid and lost his greatest asset, courage. The cops and the magistrates wouldn’t have a clue about his Maoritanga. He is one kind of militant.

Jails exist essentially to break the courage of the prisoner. If you lick the warders’ arses you get a shortened sentence. If ‘social adjustment’ means the loss of the hard core of militancy, then adjustment is spiritual castration. The present labour of the pakeha churches, pakeha schools, and pakeha jails, is to castrate spiritually the Maori boys and girls.

If they had castrated my son, then I would have been strongly tempted to plant a hundredweight of gelignite under the gates of Waikeria.

7.

Our jails are full of confused militants, Maori and pakeha. They know that somebody or something has been trying to do them grievous harm, but they’re not sure who, or what the harm is. I don’t want them to stop being militant. I want their militancy to take an effective form.

The Maori members of Nga Tamatoa, who have been through the pakeha schools, know very well that they have been robbed of their Maoritanga by a system of education which is used consciously or unconsciously by the Government as an instrument to exterminate the Maori culture. This breeds the rage that comes to people who are being robbed of their cultural identity.

They may not see that the pakeha kids are also sufferers, because the rosecoloured spectacles the schools give them to look at the majority culture will rob them of their chance to change that culture until they take the glasses off and use their own two eyes. The members of Nga Tamatoa can see that a Maori man who has passed the examinations may get a job in a Government Department, but he will never rise to the top of that Department. Equality is a bus the Polynesian never quite catches. But is an equal seat at table much use when the table is loaded with rotten kai?

Mrs Ratana said to one of the Maori children in the convent school at Hiruharama, ‘You get your education, and then go up and push the pakeha off his chair.’ I understand this view. But a full share in the gravy dish, and> page 505 a full share in the power structure, if it were obtainable in a secretly racist society, would also mean the status of a well-paid slave in the pyramid structure of a Department or a business firm.

Rata once said to me, ‘As we grow more affluent we also grow more selfish. We don’t look after one another so well.’

Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan once said to me, ‘We come into this place with fire in our hearts. After a year or two it gets covered with ash.’

The Maori MPs are very much more alive and awake than their pakeha colleagues. But they find it hard to fight an unjust economic and social structure from the inside. They always run the risk of losing touch with the people. I love and respect them. But I do not envy them their jobs.

The lie told to Maori youth is this: You can climb the pakeha ladder and still keep your Maoritanga. I would prefer to see them tear down the pakeha ladder and put a Maori ladder in its place. The pakeha ladder is worm-eaten. It may even crumble under its own weight.

The Maori revolution is not something that might one day happen. It has been burning like a slow fuse ever since the Land Wars. If it takes clearer shape, it could resemble the shape of a man’s body. The members of Nga Tamatoa might be its head; the people of the poorest maraes, its heart; the ones who are being injured in the borstals and the jails, its balls and its guts. Those members of the Maori establishment might play a part in it who would be prepared to cut free from the pakeha establishment and make some tribal lands available to the dispossessed.

If the head and the heart and the guts were joined together, the head would lose its introspective bitterness, the heart would be strengthened and begin to rejoice, and the guts would no longer be smashed by confused militancy in conflict with the pakeha police or group rivals. I do not think the Maori revolution actually needs guns. It needs centres on the marae where the people getting smashed in the towns can recover their strength. It needs calculated militancy in the style of Te Whiti. It is true that Te Whiti’s movement was broken by pakeha military aggression. But nowadays the Press would make all militant action public, and world opinion would play a part. Furthermore, manypakehas who are themselves inconflict withour socialorder would give support to a militant movement but not to a military one.

These reflections may seem daydreams. But the violence which is likely to rise in our towns in the next five or ten or fifteen years is no daydream. For some it will be a very real nightmare. I hope to see controlled and non-violent militancy. If groups of Maori militants were to squat on Crown lands, and build huts and till the ground, they might get jail sentences, but they would also get support from the weak but real liberal conscience of the country. By the use of guns they would lose that support. The status of the victim has vastly greater political magnetism than the status of the assassin.

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8. If the Government policy of forced assimilation, pressed home since the last century by the use of the gun, the law and the schools, is finally successful, and the Maori culture is annihilated, it will not be a clean death. The dismembered body of the Maori culture will rot in jails and mental hospitals throughout this country. The stink may make us all die of asphyxiation. One should remember the legend of the plagues of Egypt. The last and worst plague was a plague of great darkness in which a man could not see his hand in front of his face.
9. In relation to Maori lands, the Government is like a dog crouching under a table on which somebody is crumbling a loaf of bread. Each time that crumbs fall to the ground the Government licks them up with its tongue. It hopes in time to devour the whole loaf. This is the effect of the present Maori land legislation.
10. When petitions are presented to the Government, as Ratana presented a petition with more than thirty thousand signatures, the Government waits till the people go away and then uses the petition to wipe its backside. But when a movement is militant, the Government shakes in its shoes, for militancy means that the Government has to spend money and face the opinion of the Press, and the blood of the Government is money and the Press is a watchdog it finds it hard to keep chained.
11. A hidden racism is part of the pattern of the majority culture. In his heart of hearts the average pakeha man knows that he is weak, lonely and stupid. Without money and machines the pakeha is a crab without its shell. The vigorous communal life of a marae brings his weakness home to him. He is a ghost in the pa. This position is very hard for him to bear. Yet, if he acknowledged his weakness, instead of disguising it with aggressive racism, he might find his true role, in the loving relationship of a younger brother to an elder brother who has a vastly wider range of social intelligence.
12. The pakeha man lacks the strength to overturn his own money-centred culture and return to a communal base. But Maori militancy may open a door for him. Not all pakehas can be bought, just as not all Maoris desire communality. I would hope that Maori militants would make room for some pakehas in the canoe who might come from need or love with no axe to grind. But the Maori groups would have to make sure the pakehas did not fall unconsciously into their old habit of sitting at the top of the table.
13. The name of God becomes an aspirin if religion is used to divert men from social militancy. God is found at the moment of danger when people put friendship before their own security. page 507
14. A small seed can grow into a large tree. If non-communal use of land is the cause of social evils, communal inhabiting of the land can bring back health. But the canoes are smashed in the towns, and people have to swim or drown. The pas could grow again if the people in the half-empty canoes made room for drowning swimmers who were not necessarily of their own tribe.
15.

Religion is the deepest single factor. Militants have to get their minds clear about religion. The Churches have succeeded in the past hundred years in convincing a great many Maori people that they should be ashamed of being Maori. An old nun once said to me grimly, ‘Mr Baxter, it was hard to get them to get rid of their Maori habits!’ She was not being ironical.

If you can get the victim to prepare the rope and then hang himself, it means less hard work. To make people ashamed of communal property values, of sanely humorous sexual attitudes, of a style of work and a style of clothing and even of one’s own language, takes time. The results are a victory to the Devil. Either spiritual castration or a rebellion into atheism.

This would be the case if the Maori prophets had not come to do the work the pakehas were incapable of doing. They drew from Te Atua and from the hearts of Te Morehu a Maori Christianity, hidden, abused, fragmented, but still viable.

The Maori militants frequently say to me, ‘I do not believe in the God of the pakeha. I believe in the religion of the Maori.’ They are right. But the religion of the Maori is still developing. It could be the mainspring of the Maori revolution. If it followed the tradition of Te Whiti, it could be militant without becoming military.

Oku manaakitanga ki a koutou.

1972 (695)