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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Is There a Colour Bar in New Zealand?

Is There a Colour Bar in New Zealand?

I imagine that if this question were asked of an equal number of Maoris and pakehas of equal social and educational status, the reply from the pakeha group would be largely negative, from the Maori group significantly non- committal. ‘The toad beneath the harrow knows / Full well where every tooth-point goes.’ For most people, however, the problem is buried under a mass of half truths and misconceptions. It may be worthwhile to discuss some of these.

A colour bar may mean one of three things – inequality before the law of two races of different colour; the discrimination, conscious and unconscious, of people of one race against people of another race of a different colour, in social and economic spheres; or a combination of both, such as now exists in South Africa. We may plume ourselves on the absence of a colour bar in New Zealand, forgetting the second and perhaps most real definition. Let us consider for a moment what associations we connect with the word ‘Maori’.

First the schoolbook tapestry of people and events, Te Rauparaha and Te Kooti, guns, flax and greenstone tikis; then, the posters of the Government Tourist Bureau, a fleshy wahine beside a smoking geyser, half historical, half derived from those we have known at work, the faces in the street. When it has all been sifted, what have we left? An elusive figure, partly of our own creation, indubitably born and brought up in the pa, a person of another culture, not fully to be trusted (for one does not trust the stranger), perhaps to be placated with awkward compliments, whose pigmentation is the badge and seal of difference. Towards this figure one has two main attitudes, often held simultaneously. One speaks of the ‘fine’ Maori race – (in what way fine? In physique? Intelligence? Moral character? Creativity?) Or one speaks of the lazy Maori, the difficult Maori, the dirty Maori, the Maori who cannot be taught anything. That is, [members of ] the Maori race are ‘fine’ in the King Country or in the Maori Battalion. Within our social structure they are an irritation, reminders that the structure is not absolute, perhaps also able to waken an obscure sense of guilt. In any discussion of the relationship between Maori and pakehas one meets this double view, at once sentimental and harsh, two sides of the same coin: essentially a defence mechanism against reallypage 125 facing up to a real situation. And there is reason to believe that Maoris as well as pakehas have their own defence mechanism, a determination to prove that they are not only as-good-as, but better-than; the profound underlying resentment of a person who is being treated as a symbol.

In the last century the representatives of two very different cultures met, clashed, and achieved an uneasy equilibrium. Since that time the dominant culture has squeezed the other to death. The ‘Maori problem’, except for the oldest men and women, is not one of preserving tribal tradition and racial unity; rather it is – how can So-and-So, a Maori, adapt himself most successfully to a pakeha society? And how can those pakehas meet him sanely as a man with special problems?

I remember two Maoris with whom I worked for nearly a year. Both were mutton-butchers – that is, they were among the elite of freezing-works society. A— was a particularly well-set man; a good footballer; highly efficient at the job; somewhat better read than most freezing-workers. He had no accent: he had, if I remember right, never seen the inside of a pa. He seemed to fit naturally and easily into the give-and-take of men working together, without revealing any tension. I doubt if the pakeha butchers thought of him consciously as Maori.

B— was a stocky, dark, wiry-haired man; a trifle awkward in his movements; in his early twenties. He had grown up in a pa and had a noticeable accent. He was not quite as efficient at the job as A—, and A— had rather taken him under his protection.

A black sheep escaped from the hands of a butcher and slithered to the door. Someone shouted, probably without malice – ‘There goes your brother, B—!’ B— would have knocked the man down if A— had not stepped in. This was counted peculiarly bad temper on B—’s part. I think that at all times he felt an outsider. His pa background rather than his colour was the decisive factor.

C— also, who worked in the gut room, was a very dark Maori, a heavy drinker (though no heavier than the pakeha foreman); always irritable, at times given to violent rages. In an argument a pakeha worker called him a ‘black b—!’ and C— knocked him into the tub where the tripes were boiled. This, too, was counted hypersensitivity.

From such incidents rise many of the legends of the ‘difficulty’ of Maori workers. I doubt if any of the men in the place, if they had been Maori, would have shown the humour and balance of A— (true, he was not directly insulted). The colour insult is most easily answered by a blow. A full-blooded Maori might have set his back against his family tree. But the problems of most Maoris in New Zealand are problems of the half-caste.

The bilingual difficulty is a central problem in education. There are schools in which Maori children are strapped for speaking Maori. Thus the difficulty of acquiring a new set of verbal symbols is augmented by disastrous teachingpage 126 methods. In verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests carried out with a group of Maori girls, the standard of whose school-work was average, there was a significant gap in the scoring of bilingual pupils in the two different kinds of test. The myth that Maoris are less intelligent than pakehas may spring partly from the difficulty a bilingual and bi-cultural Maori may find in using solely the symbols of pakeha society.

Partly owing to these educational difficulties, partly owing to the seasonal work of many Maori families, which breaks the continuity of school work, the great majority of Maori boys and girls go into labouring jobs and domestic service. Even the Maori colleges equip only a very few of their pupils for the professions. Thus the contribution which Maori men and women make to pakeha culture is often made at the lowest social level. Similarly they also acquire the manners and habits of the pakeha labouring class, which in our society run mainly in barren grooves. If in the isolation and rough-and-tumble of city life a Maori falls into delinquency, the newspapers present the case in savage detail. No doubt the Maori clubs, such as Ngati Poneke, give some stability; but they are separate from the larger pakeha social group, and exist to help the Maori in the city who feels lost in pakeha society.

Plainly the problem of Maori and pakeha is not whether the two races should mingle. They have already mingled, haphazardly, and often, for the Maori, disastrously. The problem lies in the deepest attitudes of members of each race towards the other. How many people with rooms to let refuse to let them to Maoris on the ground that ‘they’ are unmethodical and irregular in their attendance at work? These are blanket statements, and generally founded entirely on prejudice. They indicate the existence of a colour bar. We are also offended by an attitude less anxious than our own toward money, sex, and the rougher features of human living; though we could have learned much and let some air into our hutches of closed ideas. How many Maoris also have retreated (understandably) into preoccupation with the monuments of their own culture and rejected what good we have to offer? It is difficult to say whose loss is the greater – our own, who have not profited by our temporary propinquity to a rich and intricate tribal culture; or the Maoris, who have seen that culture disintegrate and are offered in its place the worst features of our own anxious and acquisitive society – and the Church which, whatever we may think, is not our private possession and creation.

If the preceding article seems to some readers [to be written in] strong language, I would like them to ask themselves one question – If they are pakeha: Would you be glad to see your son or daughter marry a Maori? If they are Maori: Would you be glad to see your son or daughter marry a pakeha?

1953 (70)