Clifton Crais & Hongi Hika

Scott Hamilton

I was excited to find Hongi Hika in the list of characters at the beginning of Clifton Crais' acclaimed new book The Killing Age. But Crais gets the Nga Puhi warlord wrong, and his error points to a wider problem with his book. The Killing Age ranges across the world of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and describes the immense violence violence that accompanied European colonialism, the industrial revolution, and the export of guns. Crais suggests we should rename the era the Mortocene.

The most interesting innovation in the book is Crais' reinvention of the term warlord. He characterises officials of the British East India Company and settler leaders in America as warlords. The term has previously been used only to describe non-Western figures. Crais characterises Hongi Hika as a warlord, and describes how he used a journey to Britain and New South Wales to acquire guns that gave him an enormous advantage over traditional enemies of his iwi. He quotes a description of Hika as the 'Maori Napoleon'.

Hika's feats make the comparison reasonable. After Te Arawa holed up in a motu-pa protected by the moat of Lake Rotorua, he led a taua that paddled hundreds of kilometres south through the ocean, then made its way up a series of rivers, then hauled waka through bush. Finally his warriors crossed the lake and stormed the pa. But Crais wrongly refers to Hika 'conquering' the land of other iwi, when the chief never attempted to hold on to rohe he'd captured. Hika appointed no governors, levied no taxes, built no capital city.

He fought with modern weapons, but was motivated by traditional Maori ideas about war. He sought utu for insults and defeats his tribe had suffered, and he sought to assert and increase his mana. It is impossible to understand nineteenth century NZ history without being mindful of utu and mana. Crais appears unfamiliar with the concepts.

Irish Republicans dubbed the Union Jack 'the butcher's apron' because of the bloody way the British Empire was built and maintained. This painting shows men from Punjab being tied to the barrels of cannons by British in 1858, in the aftermath of the First Indian War of Independence. Indian 'mutineers' were blown to pieces by the cannons.

Some of the most important battles of Aotearoa's inter-iwi wars were determined by perceptions of mana, not manpower or tactics. In 1740 Waiohua were winning a battle with Ngati Whatua at Little Muddy Creek. The two iwi were fighting for control of Tamaki Makaurau. Waihua had the best of the early stages of the battle, but then their leader Kiwi Tamaki was killed. With the mana of the great rangatira gone, the Waiohua force felt doomed. Ngati Whatua fighters chased them from the Waitakeres down to Titirangi beach, where the leaderless fighters were slaughtered.

Titokowaru was another war leader invested with enormous mana. In 1868 the great Ngati Ruanui fighter had repeatedly defeated colonial armies, until the government in Wellington feared it might lose control of much of the entire Taranaki region. Titokowaru built an enormous and perhaps impregnable pa to consolidate his victories. But his army disintegrated mysteriously in the summer of 1869. A descendant of one of Titokowaru's generals told me that the great fighter had been discovered in flagrante with the wife of one of his subordinates. What is certain is that his mana suddenly evaporated.

Another famous warlord of nineteenth century Aotearoa made steps towards a new conception of power and new forms of organisation. Te Rauparaha made some of the iwi he had conquered in Te Wai Pounamu pay him rent. Unlike Hongi, he was interested in maintaining control over land he had won in war.

It was the threat of Pakeha dominance that would lead to greater centralisation of Maori power, and to the beginnings of indigenous states. The Kingitanga movement established a capital, a parliament, and a tax system.

Don Stafford's outstanding study of Hongi Hika's extraordinary attack on Rotorua benefits from Stafford's decades researching Te Arawa history and close links with kaumatua of the iwi. It is a pity Clifton Crais did not consult books like this one. 

The traditional Maori conception of war might seem inexplicable to outsiders, but it was part of a systematic worldview. Mana was linked to mauri, a life force flowing thru the universe, and insults to mana were a threat to the order of the universe. Mana could bring peace as well as war.

Hongi Hika's wars brought slaughter and enslavement, but they could end in peace agreements and reconciliation. In his account of the epic expedition to Rotorua Don Stafford explains how the defeated iwi Te Arawa and Nga Puhi feasted together and made peace after the capture of Mokoia island. That peace has held to the present day.

As even the more remote iwi gained guns, the advantage Nga Puhi had enjoyed disappeared. A new generation was more interested in trading with Pakeha and planting new crops than wars for honour. Hongi Hika became an anachronism. Biographers show the elderly warlord travelling from kainga to kainga, trying to recruit uninterested young men in new taua. The world had changed; Hongi Hika had not. He of a wound he got in a skirmish with other Nga Puhi.

Crais' misunderstanding of Hongi Hika reflects a wider problem with his book. He doesn't spend enough time on the particularities of indigenous societies - their social structures, their religions, their cultures. He doesn't let us see through their eyes. Because they were different from each other, indigenous societies responded in very different ways to new technology and to the predations of Europeans. Crais is keen to document the unparalleled destructiveness of the Mortocene, but he has failed to capture the variety and agency of the peoples confronted by colonialism and guns in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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