LAND WHERE COLOUR BAR UNKNOWN.

Chronicle (Levin), 13 November 1946, Page 2

LAND WHERE COLOUR BAR UNKNOWN.

DOMINION SETS EXAMPLE TO UNITED STATES Ree.eived Tuesday, 9.40 p.m. NEW YORK, Nov. 12. In a sensitively written, deeply understanding story of his association with the No.rth lsl^.nd Maoris during his term of duty in the South Pacilie, a young United States Marine Captain, John Lee Zimmerman, contrasts the nianner wherein Maoris and pakehas live together with the racial distinctions of the southern part of United States. Captain Zimmerman, whose hook "Where the People Sing — Green Land of the Maoris just published by Alfred A. Knopf, became A elose friend and admirer of the Maoris wliile training to serve on Guadalcanal. He t'lien went and spent ,a long time in New Zealand after being invalided from Guadalcanal with malaria. . Discussing relations between the wliites and Maoris, Caxitain Zimmerman says: "It is inevitable, I think, that the spectacle of such matter of fact unastentatious, interracial good feeling should have caused me to think of contrasting the state of affairs in my own ; eountry. The first and obvious conelusion whereto I came was, if such a satisfactory condition cxisted in one een- | tury, there was no good reason why a : comxiarable condition should not'cxist in another. There were in New Zealand ! a darlc race and a wliite race. The lattcr outuumbered the former and controlied the eountry and yet the two races lived in cntire liarmony. If such a tliiug cxisted in New Zealand, it could exist in my own land. Since it has not existed there, some fault must lie in the wliite race oi' my own land — some deeply buried laok of proper understanding of the minority negro group." Ai'ter rei'erring to the fact that he i'ound mauy Americau southerners fraternisiug with the Maoris with every sigii of entliusiastic enjoyment, Captain Zimmerman says: "The Maori is never sexiarated entirely from his past for the very land whereon he lives is identilied intimately with his history and that of his family. His neiglibours are liis fellow tribesmen and more oi'ten than not his blood relatives. If by chance his neighbour is from another tribe, the chauces are lliat far back in the history of tlie generations, he and that neighbour also may lind a common ancestor. Of one xiiece with that realisation of his past, is his de£>endence ujion it and his curious sense of identilication with it. His rnost rigid rulcs of personal eonduct are dictated by his respect for -Ihe reputation enjoyetl by his ancestors — reputation for personal honour, bravery in battle and wisdom. There, I think, lies the reason for the great difference between Maori and pakeha relations in New Zealand and the wliitenegro relations in United States. Where tlie modern Maori lives on good terms with his past and looks on it with a quiet pride, the negro looks back only on the vague distant history of his origin in a land as alien to hiin as to his wliite eountry men. The negro also suFers under the tremendous psychologiftal liandicap of having been a slave."