In New York, Miriam’s star continued to rise, as she met some of the biggest musical American celebrities of the day such as Louis Armstrong, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier and Ray Charles. Since her exile, she began to take a more political stance in her work, though that is not how she would phrase it. ‘I do not sing politics,’ she said. ‘I merely sing the truth.’ While she lived in America, she also criticised segregation there, relating it to her struggle back home. ‘There wasn’t much difference in America,’ she said. ‘It was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way.’ When an interviewer asked her to compare the two countries, she explained that ‘the only difference between South Africa and America is very slight. South Africa admits that they are what they are.’
In the 1960s Miriam testified several times at the United Nations about the reality of South African apartheid. She spoke about the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police opened fire on thousands of anti-apartheid protestors. She decried mass imprisonment of activists such as Lillian Ngoyi and Nelson Mandela and said that ‘My country has been turned into a huge prison.’ She told the UN that South Africa should be put under economic sanctions and an arms embargo. For this, South Africa revoked her citizenship altogether, leaving her stateless. By this point, though, she was an international celebrity, and was offered passports and honorary citizenships all over the world.
The United States government didn’t think of her so fondly. In 1968 Miriam married the leader of the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael, alienating those white audiences who had enjoyed her music but apparently weren’t fans of her anti-racist politics. Her white audiences turned their backs on her, radio stations stopped playing her music, and the US government began spying on her. When she and her husband were out of the country, she was once again banned from returning, this time to the United States, who had revoked her visa. The couple moved to Guinea instead, and remained there for 15 years.
Exiled first by South Africa and then by the US, Miriam went on tour with her band across Europe and Africa and grew ever more famous, and ever more critical of both countries. The US began censoring the political aspects of her concerts shown on television, and her music in South Africa remained banned. The more the US and South Africa tried to diminish Miriam, the more outspoken she became in her criticisms and activism, and the more popular her music became around the world. She became known as ‘Mama Africa’.
As the apartheid system began to be dismantled, Miriam was finally able to return to South Africa in 1990, a few months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The first place she visited was her mother’s grave, where she could finally sit and grieve with her after so many decades.
Miriam carried on performing and singing all the way until her death in 2008, when she collapsed shortly after a joyful performance in Italy, aged 76. Mandela described the impact she had had on black South Africans living under the oppression of apartheid, saying that ‘her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us’. It turns out you can’t ban someone’s music from your country. People will find a way to listen to the songs that their government doesn’t want them to hear – especially when they are as beautiful as Miriam Makeba’s.
72
Te Puea Herangi
1883–1952
For those who find it hard to coordinate a night out with your friends via the group Whatsapp, the story of Te Puea Herangi will be an especially humbling study in what it takes to be a true leader.
Te Puea was born in 1883 in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North Island. She was a leader in the King movement, or Kingitanga, which sought in the 1850s to unite certain Maori tribes in the North Island under a single king. In the face of land confiscations by European settlers of New Zealand, known in the Maori language as Pakeha, the Kingitanga provided a way for Maori peoples of the Waikato region to organise and preserve their autonomy and their land.
Though she never held the kingship, or a formal role in New Zealand’s parliamentary government, none would do more in the first half of the 20th century to fight for the Kingitanga, the Waikato, or Maori rights in general than Te Puea did in her lifetime.
Even as a child, Te Puea had a commanding presence and displayed uncommon intelligence. When her mother died in 1898, she was recalled from school to come home and take up a bigger role in her community. When her older sister moved away from the region, Te Puea found herself the effective head of her tribe.
Still just a teenager, Te Puea suffered from chronic tuberculosis and did not expect to live a long life. Believing her time to be limited, she spent her teenage years enjoying herself, smoking and drinking and having plenty of sex. She was incredibly beautiful as well as bold and charming, and it was said that she could merely point at any man at a hui, a Maori meeting or social gathering, and he would be all hers. (In later years, Te Puea would devote herself to keeping young Maori on the straight and narrow, hoping they’d avoid the same excesses of her youth.)
As she began to mature, Te Puea turned her seemingly limitless energy to organising, leading, and bettering the lot of Waikato people.
Te Puea believed in cooperation among Maori tribes and was fiercely loyal to her people and the kings whose reigns she lived under. She herself was the granddaughter of one king, Tawhiao Te Wherowhero, and the niece of another, Mahuta. In 1913, a smallpox outbreak devastated Maori populations, who were more susceptible to the Pakeha disease and unable to receive treatment from hospitals that did not allow access to Maori people. Te Puea responded by setting up open-air hospitals to nurse the sick people herself.
At the outbreak of World War I, she would face an incredible test of leadership when the New Zealand government tried to impose conscription on the Maori of the Waikato, as British colonial administrations would on native peoples throughout the empire. While some Maori politicians believed their people should serve and so prove that Maori fighters were equal to their European counterparts, Te Puea was a firm pacifist, and what’s more, did not see it as just or right that her people should have to offer up their lives for a colonial power that had broken its promises to them and taken their land. ‘They tell us to fight for king and country,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s all right. We’ve got a king. But we haven’t got a country. That’s been taken off us. Let them give us back our land and then maybe we’ll think about it again.’
Angry that Waikato tribes refused to serve, the government implemented mandatory conscription on Maori in 1917 – but only enforced it in the Waikato. Waikato men between the ages of 17 and 30 faced arrest if they did not comply. Te Puea invited these men to join her, and promised to shelter them. ‘If we die,’ she said, ‘let us all die together.’
When the police came to try and enforce conscription on the group of men, she told them, ‘I will not agree to my children going to shed blood.’ The police took her youngest brother, who was only 16, but throughout the encounter the Maori remained passive and non-violent. So passive, in fact, that one very large man proved a bit of a challenge for the police: ‘One of them was enormously fat,’ Te Puea recorded. ‘He just lay on the ground. The police had much difficulty in carrying him to the motor car. Of course no one would help them. We had to laugh, despite our tears.’
These men were detained, and subjected to what the officials called ‘dietary punishments’ – being given such small amounts of bread and water as to try to break their spirits. But they remained strong in detention, and Te Puea would come to sit outside the prison to join them.
Unable to break the solidarity of Waikato, the government tried another tack: implying that Te Puea’s pacifism was in fact due to her being of German extraction and loyal to the Germans in the war. (Her grandfather, whom she never knew, had a German surname but was in fact English.) She replied to the smears in style: ‘What if I am German? So is the British Royal Family. In fact I am neither pro-German nor anti-British. I am simply pro-Maori.’ After the war ended in 1919, all of the Maori prisoners were qui
etly released from detention.
Her leadership in the face of the conscription struggle shot Te Puea to ever-widening fame. Te Puea led by example and never cared what people thought about her getting her hands dirty. She once again nursed people through the devastating Spanish Flu epidemic, and adopted many orphans. If manual labour was ever needed, she would simply begin the work herself and others would follow. When many years later she was awarded a CBE for services to the Maori and to New Zealand, she would nearly miss the ceremony because she was busy in the kitchens helping prepare food for the event. She accepted the award while still wearing the slippers she worked in.
Te Puea’s community organising would reach more and more Maori tribes and more corners of New Zealand. Faced with flooding in their ancestral home, she led her tribe to relocate to a new village at Turangawaewae, where she would set up a community so well organised that it would come to be a key stopping place for VIP visitors to New Zealand. She began a performing troupe that toured the country to raise money for the community, putting on performances of traditional Maori music and haka. As her fame increased, so did the Kingitanga, the King Movement, and the perceived legitimacy of the king – though not all Maori tribes supported the movement. Te Puea became something of a diplomat both to other tribes and to Pakeha politicians and even prime ministers, whom she lobbied on behalf of Waikato relentlessly. She revived traditional Maori spiritual practices, and oversaw the construction of important Maori meeting houses and canoes.
In WWII, she remained a pacifist, but adopted the policy that any of her people who desired to enlist would not be stopped from doing so. Meanwhile, she contributed to the war effort in other ways, fundraising for the Red Cross and entertaining American troops stationed in New Zealand with her performing troupe. And year after year, she worked to improve education and health care for Maori people.
At the heart of the struggle of the Waikato people for the decades of Te Puea’s life, however, was the unresolved issue of land. 800,000 acres of Maori land had been confiscated in 1864, and Te Puea was central to the fight for reparations of that land. Land reparations were – and remain – a controversial issue.
Te Puea negotiated a deal for monetary reparations, explaining her thinking thus: ‘Money can never wipe away the blood that has been shed. No settlement can ever efface the tears that have fallen. And those who suffered most are no longer with us. No, money is not everything. But it means as much to know we have been proved right.’ For Te Puea, what mattered more than the money was the government’s admission in granting reparations that a historic crime had been committed against her people.
OK, how the hell did she manage all this in a lifetime? And she did it while battling poor health for most of her life. Her entry in the 1951 edition of Who’s Who may hold the answer: ‘Have no recreations. When I am not working I sleep.’ And yet she enjoyed life – and not just in her wild teenage years. She loved her community and called all who followed her her children. She was unfailingly honest, loving, and forthright – though very strict about cleanliness, morality, and drinking.
Over 10,000 people came to pay their respects in the week after Te Puea died at age 68 in 1952. Though she is gone, so much of what she created in her lifetime has lasted to the present day. The buildings she built, the movement she shepherded so carefully, and the community she protected and advanced, give credit to her immense life’s work.
73
Whina Cooper
1895–1994
(front left)
Whina Cooper, the Maori leader known as Te Whaea o te Motu or ‘Mother of the Nation’ in New Zealand, got her start as an organiser at a young age. She was born Whina Te Wake in 1895 in the Hokianga region of the North Island. When she was a teenager a white New Zealander, or Pakeha, farmer began to drain 20 hectares of mudflats on Maori land in order to use it for farming. He had obtained the lease to do so from the government, who granted it because the land was not being ‘used’. In fact, it was a source of shellfish for the Maori, as well as a perfect place to race horses in the summer when the mudflats dried. And anyway, if the Maori only wanted the mudflats in order to do absolutely nothing with them but go for squidgy walks from time to time, it was their land.
The local Maori met to discuss what to do. Whina’s father, Heremia Te Wake, wanted to find a solution through political lobbying, but the young Whina had an idea that wouldn’t take weeks, by which time the mudflats could already be drained. She proposed instead to lead a group of workers down to the mudflats to fill in the drains as the Pakeha farmer dug them. She was charming and polite, no matter how pissed off the farmer got, and simply followed him filling in the ditches he’d dug. The farmer was furious, and called the police to arrest them – but Whina’s effort had bought enough time for her father to convince the MP to revoke the lease. All the Maori who’d taken part in the protest were summoned to court, except for Whina. After all, what could a teenage girl have had to do with it?
Whina’s boldness served her in many ways. At a dance for local young men and women, Whina met the handsome young surveyor Richard Gilbert. After World War I there was a shortage of young men, so Whina acted fast before the other girls could get in there, and asked him to marry her the very next day. He was like, YOLO, I guess, and they did. As Whina remembered it when she was old: ‘I beat all the dancers and all the girls wanting to get at him …’ She borrowed a ring from a shopkeeper to get married the next day. Lean in, Whina!
At the end of the 1920s, when it first became possible for Maori to get loans to develop their lands, Whina led the initiative. When Whina’s husband died, though, she took up with one William Cooper, who was already married. It was a huge scandal, and led to her alienation for a time from her very Catholic community.
The 1950s saw a huge migration of Maori from rural areas to the cities of New Zealand. Whina moved to Auckland and was elected the head of the Maori Women’s Welfare league, whose goal was to assist those who had moved and support the education and development of women. Whina surveyed slum housing in Auckland to reveal the exploitation of Maori families by Pakeha landlords. She worked to encourage breastfeeding and discourage drinking among Maori women in the city, and to improve health care generally. She opened the first urban marae, or Maori community centre, carrying on the legacy of the hero of the previous chapter, Te Puea Herangi, with whom she had been close.
Whina cemented her reputation as a fearless but controversial leader in the Maori Land March in 1975 aged 80. Angry at a series of laws that continued to dispossess Maori people of their lands, the decision was made to march from the top of the North Island all the way to its capital, Wellington, on the island’s southern tip. The 700-mile journey would protest the huge loss of Maori lands. Out of 66 million acres of land in New Zealand, Maori owned 2.5 million, cut from 4 million ten years before. The march comprised about 5,000 people, led by the stirring sight of Whina, aged 80, with arthritis and a cane which she would wave about while giving speeches to the marae along the way.
Whina explained the importance of the march in her biography by Michael King:
For me it was several things going on. I wanted to draw attention to the plight of Maori who were landless. I wanted to point out that people who were landless would eventually be without culture. I wanted to stop any further land passing out of Maori ownership, and I wanted the Crown to give back to Maori land it owned that was of traditional significance to Maori. The march itself was to dramatise these things, to mobilise Maori opinion, to awaken the Pakeha conscience. And I agreed to lead it because the great leaders of the past were dead – Carroll, Ngata Buck, Te Puea, Tau Henare, Paraire Paikea. I was the last one that had known all those people. I had gone around with them, watched them, listened to them, and filled up my baskets of knowledge from them. I wanted to put that knowledge to good use.
Whina was accused in her life of being too autocratic, and throughout the march she would kick anybody off who snuck away in the evenings to go drinking
– it was meant to be a highly spiritual and symbolic journey. Once they arrived at parliament, Whina led the marchers in a show of unity among Maori tribes, having successfully turned the national conversation to Maori land loss. At the conclusion of the march, however, younger and more radical marchers began to camp out in front of parliament and demand to see concrete results from the government. Whina, who was more conservative, was non-confrontational – (other than the part where she, well, led a 700-mile march, waving her walking stick at people along the way). This angered some of the marchers, and even more so when she accepted honours from the British government, who eventually made her a dame. Some more radical Maori disrupted that ceremony, believing her to have sold out to the Pakeha by accepting their honours.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Whina was a once-in-a-generation community organiser and activist, having personally visited the marae of every Maori tribe to wave her walking stick at them and convince them to join the march. She had faced initial resistance from the Maori affairs minister in government, who at first considered the march to be an affront to his representation of the Maori in the New Zealand government. He asked her for a meeting, and she said no because the decision had already been made to march. His secretary then said: ‘Very well. We’ll close down all the maraes on your way,’ so that they’d have nowhere to stay along the journey. Whina replied: ‘That’s all right, as long as the road isn’t shut we’ll sleep there.’ The minister backed down.
Whina even managed to get permission for the marchers to be the first pedestrians to cross the Auckland Harbour Bridge. She became a media sensation and a figurehead for New Zealand as a whole. Along the way, the marchers collected the signatures of Maori leaders and elders across the whole of the island, and carried a stake at the head of the march known as a pouwhenua, which is meant to declare the tribal ownership of land. The protestors never allowed the stake to touch the ground along their journey, showing how much land had been lost by Maori.
100 Nasty Women of History Page 20