Lost Kingdom

7. Secret paper, illicit marriage and an angry king

Taufa’āhau devotees would get prickly over claims that the king had absolute power. The only real argument was just how absolute it was. The Fale Alea was made up of 30 members, 12 appointed for life terms by the king and served as cabinet. The kingdom’s 33 hereditary nobles, voting among themselves, supplied nine members and the commoners were in perpetual minority with nine members. Taufa’āhau told former British civil servant Kenneth Bain, that ‘apart from the possible exception of Switzerland, Tonga is, I believe, the only country in the world where a responsible government is in a perpetual minority in the legislature; but it has comfort in the knowledge that even if it is outvoted on a material point it does not go out of office.’ Despite his musing, Tonga had become a dark and divisive community, one which saw the monarch and nobles benefited but commoners addressed as kainanga 'o e fonua or ‘dirt eater’ and me'a vale or ‘ignorant thing’. Change was coming. The novelist and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa: ‘In Tonga, the term for commoners is me'a vale, the 'ignorant ones', which is a survival from an era when the aristocracy controlled all important knowledge in the society. Keeping the ordinary folk in the dark and calling them ignorant made it easier to control and subordinate them.’ Hau’ofa wrote satirical novels Tales of the Tikongs (1983) and Kisses in the Nederends (1987). Asked why he only wrote two such novels, he replied he did not want to become the Salman Rushdie of Tonga.

Helu and Kavaliku, the appointed education minister, were both born in 1939, Pōhiva in 1941. While they were loyal to Tonga and its culture, they would be agitators, perhaps even insurgents, causing turmoil for King Taufa’āhau and his nobles. Ultimately they would bring down his successor. What tied the three was an interest in academic arguments, as well as a location, the Suva based University of the South Pacific. In time USP would turn into a trickle of not so many revolutionaries, but democrats who felt with the wave of South Pacific independence had no place for an absolute monarchy. 

A brief marriage: a princess and a commoner