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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Courage to Mud Farmers

Courage to Mud Farmers

I have heard that a Maori chief could not make war without the consent of the members of the tribe expressed in popular agreement on the marae. Among us it is different. Our Government can make war without a referendum. Our participation in the Vietnam War does not necessarily have the support of the majority of our people.

I sat behind two young Maori soldiers on a bus. They were discussing in detail and with great enthusiasm the kind of machines they were being taught to use in the army – trucks, helicopters, guns. They also spoke about the Vietnam War. It was a How conversation, not a Why conversation. I remember that they talked for some time about booby-traps set by the Viet Cong along the jungle tracks.

As far as I could gather, they were in the army because their friends were in the army, and because they had a great interest in the army machines. Perhaps they had found it hard to get work in the New Zealand towns. There is another factor. In recruiting young Maori men into the army, the Government somewhat cynically capitalises on the toa, or warrior tradition of the Maori. I say it is cynical because of the gross neglect of Maori veterans. After the pains of their war experiences, many come back to a jobless position, to the pubs, and to the ignorant fists of the police. Some of course come back in their coffins.

page 355

I offer the simple comment that it was not the Vietnamese mud farmer who annexed the Maori lands. Furthermore, it is not a Communist party boss but our local authority figure, Mr Holyoake, who is acquiring, through discreet intermediaries, acre upon acre of the remaining Maori lands on the shores of Lake Taupo, so that he can create, for his own financial profit, a millionaires’ tourist paradise. These little habits need to be discussed. When American tourists are dropping cigarette butts and lolly papers among the Maori graves, the local Maori people will be free to reflect on the paradoxes of power politics – that Holyoake is alive and has the land and the money, that some of their sons are dead and more of them jobless, and that our allies in Vietnam have arrived peacefully in New Zealand to spend money catching trout and breaking tapu. We will have here a modicum of the difficult peace which our Government has told us we are fighting for.

The key point, for me, is not the atrocities of the Vietnam War – the War indeed has the contours of one prolonged, immense atrocity – but the unending battle of human beings to avoid being forced into a coffin of servility. When it was famine time in Vietnam, the mud farmers used to trek into Saigon like ghosts, and stand watching while members of a semi-affluent middle class fed themselves behind the plate glass of restaurants, and die there of hunger. Or else a farmer might sell his best looking daughter to the travelling agent of the town brothel owner, so that the rest of the family would survive, since the landlord wanted the same rent, famine or no famine.

Once, at a rally in Wellington against participation in the Vietnam War, I heard a Vietnamese girl student get up and speak. Her sincerity, her fire and beauty and partisanship, and above all her courage in a semi-hostile group in the middle of a country which has never been kind to foreigners – these things moved my heart to a strong sympathy. She spoke with passion about the members of her family who were in their graves after battle with the Viet Cong, and urged us to change our attitude. But she unwittingly spoilt her speech by concluding with the words – ‘Who are the Viet Cong anyway? They are only mud farmers.’

Her brothers had not died in famine. Neither she nor her sisters would have to work in a brothel.

I am not a political man, at least not in any narrow sense. I can see clearly enough that Government by a group, dominated by Viet Cong elements, will tend to a new social and political power structure with new dangers of enforced servility. Yet the mud farmers of the world are carrying guns now and planting bombs in restaurants and, where they have control, emptying the death houses and the brothels. May God give them courage in their dying! We have no right to intervene against them. It is time we got to work to set our own house in order before the dispossessed of our own country start carrying guns in the street.

1971 (651)