A NEW RESOLUTION

Driving home from a visit to whānau in Pawarenga this weekend and listening to our mokopuna talk in the backseat, I heard the seven year old ask, “Did you see the harakeke growing in that dead tree?”  In response her ten year old brother observed, “Ka pu te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi.” (As an old net withers, another is remade.)  This signifies new growth emerging from old growth.

Inside an iwi, this is a metaphor for a process of change from one leadership regime to another.  Like the cyclical growth and decay of trees, it is a process that takes time and space, the kind provided in gatherings such as hui, hakaminenga and rūnanga.  

I thought about this process when we heard the following morning that the “Old Man” of world politics, 93 year old Robert Mugabe, had agreed to “step down” as President of Zimbabwe.  On the surface it looks like a bloodless coup, apparently a requirement of both China and the USA in exchange for their support of those waiting in the wings to replace Mugabe.  But dress it up as they may, it is still a revolt.

The Zimbabwean historical experience of colonisation by white people matches ours.  However, their current situation fits a different metaphor captured in a quote from Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and the chief author of that country’s Declaration of Independence who went on to become its third President.  “Every generation,” Jefferson declared, “needs a new revolution.”  Does it?

Revolution is a process of change that takes place in a relatively short period of time when a group rises up in revolt against their current leaders.  It can be peaceful, but, more often than not, it isn’t.

The French Revolution had a death toll in excess of 1.4 million.  The American Revolution led to the deaths of more than 100,000 out of a population of less than 2 million.  The October Revolution saw a communist dictatorship replace a Tzarist autocracy in Russia at the loss of 9 million people.  The Iranian Revolution replaced a secular democracy with a theocratic dictatorship and a death toll somewhere between 200 people to 70,000, depending on who you believe.  Were these four revolutions alone worth that many dead?  Surely not.

Our own history is also full of warfare and death, but not on the scale described above and never merely for the sake of changing one system of government for another.  Even during the British wars of invasion when kupapa fought against other iwi, their motives were less about accepting British sovereignty and more about protecting their own rangatiratanga.

Back to Zimbabwe and Mugabe.  As I write this article, the wily Old Man has still not resigned, and his would-be replacements are looking a bit lost.  I wish they all had mokopuna sitting behind them to remind them that, just as new growth emerges from old, what every generation needs, is a new resolution.