They
say you can take the child out of the village, but you can’t take the village
out of the child.
I have been experiencing in my own
life something that seems to confirm that old saw, as I observe, with, I have
to confess, some unexpected trickles of pride, the behaviour of the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
in her perfect reaction to the tragedy that has befallen the Muslim community
in her country.
The last photo I saw of her was as
she clasped to her a distressed young woman, into whose ear she was whispering supportive
things. It brought a brief trickle of tears to my eyes, just seeing such an
ordinary, non-hierarchical action of support, completely confirming that she meant it when
she told the Muslim population in her first reaction to the tragedy, “You are
us.”
I approach this subject from an odd
position, because I left my home country at the age of 22 in 1950, and have
never really had a moment since in which I pined for its security, or wanted to
rejoin it. Even when I went back, wife and four children along, in 1975 after
25 years of absence, years during which I never made any effort of any kind to
seek out my fellow-countrymen, the choice was mostly my wife’s, and I was
simply a more or less willing participant. When I made the decision to return
to Canada the following year, my unfortunate family was destined to follow me
along.
During all those many years of my
life --- by this time I am well into middle age --- I can never remember harbouring any strong
feelings of nationalism either towards my home country or Canada, for that
matter. (It took me until the early 1990s, when I realized it was possible to
see All Black Rugby games on our television screens, that I evinced even a
moderate reviving interest in New Zealand.) I had always been a fanatic All
Black supporter as a kid, having grown up with pictures of their various teams
since 1905 plastered all over my childish
bedroom walls: and I slotted back into that posture immediately as I
observed anew the titanic Rugby battles against
South Africa, Wales --- always our two greatest traditional opponents
--- and even of England, and Australia, which, years before, we had never taken
seriously in Rugby, although they were always predominant in tennis, cricket,
athletics and many other sports, as they still are.
Even my return to New Zealand in the
1970s left me with a feeling of disaffection for the place. I had two black
children in my family, of African and West Indian origin, and two white, and I was outraged to find that
to get the black children into the country I had to fill in a special form for
them since they were of non-Caucasian origin. I had always carried with me the
myth that New Zealand had behaved better towards their indigenous Maoris than
other countries had to theirs, so I was bitterly disappointed at this official
recognition that it weren't necessarily so, that New Zealand laws were not all
that non-racist.
There had been, at that time,
considerable emigration to New Zealand from the Pacific Islands --- there has
since been large immigration from other parts of Asia --- who were admitted
when their labour was needed, and sometimes allowed to stay beyond their work
permits, if the labour situation favoured their stay. The journey from the
highly-structured, tightly-controlled environment of a Samoan village to the
free and easy life in New Zealand was an immense challenge for these islanders.
Typically, many young men took to heavy drinking, and some New Zealanders of my
acquaintance began to dismiss them as drunken bums just as had happened to my certain knowledge in Canada.
It took some years for the more
responsible members of these Island societies to gain the upper hand, and
stabilize their situations. However, once the labour situation turned against
them, they became known as “overstayers”, and the last thing I remember before
I left New Zealand in 1976 was that a
massive round-up of “overstayers” with a view to deporting them back to their
home islands, had resulted in the mistaken arrest of many native Maoris. Whereupon,
the Chief of Police announced to the world that anyone who didn’t look like a
normal New Zealander --- translation, an ordinary, good-bloke white Kiwi ---
should be carrying his papers at all times. I felt that as a bitter renunciation
of all my previous opinions that the country of my birth abhorred racism.
But that is not the final verdict, as
Ms. Ardern’s recent behaviour shows. Immense changes have taken place in the
condition of the Maori and their language since the 1970s, those changes mostly
initiated by the occasional Labour Party governments. I had grown up under
Labour. But Sid Holland, a
dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, was elected in 1949, in an election precipitated by an act of
apostasy by the Labour Prime Minister
Peter Fraser, who having been in jail when first elected in 1918 for opposing
conscription in the First World War, had returned from an Imperial Defence
Conference in London in 1949 under orders to introduce conscription against the
common bugbear of the time, the Soviet menace. Disgust with this unconscionable action was what led
to my quitting the country for good and all
I am able to judge Ms. Ardern against
not only Holland, who immediately attacked
unions (“industrial anarchy” he
called it), and eliminated many public entities, and who thus began conservative
control of the country for the next half century, with occasional brief intervals
of Labour government.
Another conservative horror figure, Robert
Muldoon was elected while I was living in New Zealand. Although I didn’t stay
long under his imprimatur, I had the horrible feeling that the more obscene and
disgraceful were the things he said, the more they were being mopped up
appreciatively by many of those around me. He made no attempt to disguise his
prejudices, and after signing the Gleneagles Agreement by which South Africa’s
apartheid regime was banished from world sporting contacts, he nevertheless approved sporting
visits to South Africa that were the direct cause of the African boycott of the
1976 Olympics. Undeterred, he allowed the visit of a South African Rugby team
to New Zealand in 1981, a visit which all-but precipitated a civil war. Protesters
turned up bearing French loaves and bicycle helmets as their attack and defence weapons, but were
savagely beaten by police when they tried to prevent crowds from attending the
games. As a final act, they bombed the last Test match in Auckland with bags of
flour from the air. This heroic demonstration of defiance in New Zealand was
one of the facts that eventually persuaded the South African leadership that
they had become the polecats of the world, and changes were needed. Later
Nelson Mandela affirmed how encouraged he and his imprisoned colleagues were by
the reaction of such a huge part of the New Zealand population.
So, while I do support and am moved
by Jacinda Ardern’s behaviour towards the targeted Muslim community, I am extremely glad the
attack did not occur under the earlier reign of the more imperial/colonialist
leaders who have led New Zealand from
time to time.
For myself, although I am not at all
sympathetic to any religion, I remember writing as long ago as the 1970s that
“that mosque at the end of the road” is a Canadian mosque, and must be treated
as such.
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