Quentin Poulsen
First allow me to apologise. As a youth I supported my country’s sporting ties with South Africa during the apartheid era. Of course, I never supported apartheid itself.
But as I once told my Ghanaian friend, an exchange student employed at the factory I worked in, I would have supported these ties equally had the black and white roles been reversed. For this he thanked me, explaining he had come to New Zealand to meet ignorant people.
Yes I was ignorant, though not only about apartheid and the importance of boycotts to bring about change. I was also ignorant about my own country. During my schooling I learnt not one thing about its native people, not one thing about their history and culture, not one word of their language.
I was unaware, for example, that the native population had been reduced by about half soon after the arrival of Europeans. Some estimates put the figure much higher. This was the result of war and disease, mostly, and provides a mirror image of ethnic cleansing in other European colonies, such as North America, where it has come to be regarded as genocide.
Not so in New Zealand. Maori academic Keri Opai was accused of “trivialising the Holocaust” in 2012 for drawing a comparison between the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and that of the indigenous people during the colonisation of New Zealand. Former Maori party co-leader Tariana Turia had sparked a similar outcry in 2000 by also using the term “Holocaust”.
Instead it has become fashionable for the term “genocide” to be applied to the actions of the native people themselves. But the extent of carnage during the intertribal Musket Wars and Chatham Islands massacre owed to the acquisition of modern weapons. And this was entirely strategical, as the British proceeded to settle lands thus made “empty”.
What does appear certain is a cultural genocide followed and continued through most of the 20th century, with Maori values largely ignored by mainstream media. State television was unrivalled in New Zealand for three decades, from the early 1960s until the end of the 1980s – by which time the average New Zealander was watching more than 20 hours of television per week. Not until the 1980s, when a five-minute Maori news segment was introduced, was there any significant native language content. Meanwhile, speaking Maori had been banned in schools until the mid-70s, while in 1984 a telephone operator was demoted for her use of the Maori greeting “Kia ora”.
Of course, the great post-War migration to the cities had already created a decline in the use of the native language. English was the language of schools and the workplace as well as the media. The Maori had no choice but to adapt to European society and by the 1980s fewer than 20 percent were considered to be fluent in their own language.
Thus they became alienated from their own culture and not surprisingly they have remained rooted to the bottom of the socio-economic scale. Maoris today comprise 15 percent of New Zealand’s population, yet account for more than half its male prisoners and more than 60 percent of its female prisoners.
The media and education institutions effectively buried indigenous culture. New Zealanders were “dumbed down” to the same extent as North Americans and Australians on natives issues. They received the same cowboy movies, the same television dramas dominated by sophisticated whites and the same reality crime shows dominated by non-white villains. And there have been the same diversions – sports, celebrity gossip and male-bashing that has nothing to do with feminism.
This was the society I grew up in; a denialist culture obsessed with its own image, but which had failed to come to terms with its past.
Therein lay the problem. An air of insincerity, or selective morality, accompanied the whole anti-Springbok tour movement, for those pointing their fingers elsewhere were quite contentedly inhabiting a nation with its own unresolved issues. It was this which grated with my juvenile sensitivies.
We may well recall the unprecedented demonstrations against South Africa’s 1981 rugby tour of New Zealand, but will we also remember the packed stadiums and the multitudes watching the games on state television?
New Zealand was divided down the middle, the media played both sides of the issue and clearly there were as many people in favour of the tour as there were against it.
Although the controversy had made me cognisant of the apartheid issue in the early 1980s, I knew nothing of the genocide being carried out on the much closer island of Timor at the very same time; and neither was I aware of the Lebanon War nor the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees.
l Poulsen is a former New Zealand journalist living in Istanbul