TOWARDS AN OBJECTIVE VIEW OF TE KOOTI

Te Ao Hou, November 1957, Page 18

TOWARDS AN OBJECTIVE VIEW OF TE KOOTI Te Kooti was the last of the militant leaders who opposed the pakeha and all he stood for Te Kooti fired the last shots in a campaign against pakeha domination which began when Hone Heke fired the first. It is most unfortunate, but true I think, that those historians who drew his picture did so in a very one sided manner. Although they were mainly contemporaries of Te Kooti, and therefore had access to a mass of primary information which would have enabled them to ascertain carefully all those circumstances and forces which produced him as a leader, they failed to take advantage of this circumstance. Almost without exception they dipped their pens in bitterness and recorded mainly those facts which would enable them to present him in, to say the least of it, a very one-sided light. Bishop W. L. Williams, otherwise a meticulous and painstaking historian dismisses Te Kooti's early life by saying “the various traders knew him as a somewhat light-fingered and troublesome fellow”. Lambert who does appear to have gathered some intereesting information about Te Kooti's early years no where gives any indication that he has come across anything to Te Kooti's credit and drops here and there such comments as that he was a ‘veritable fiend’ and ‘only a butcher’, this last, sardonically enough in comparing him with Ropata. This is not to impugn the integrity of these historians and it must be admitted that it is to the research and painstaking enquiry of contemporary writers that we have a detailed accounting of one of the most important and most interesting of all the campaigns of the Maori wars. Having read these accounts, however, one cannot but conclude that they were written with bias. Even though they give Te Kooti credit for being a shrewd and brilliant tactician, they leave no doubt that they regard him as a brutal ruffian inspired only by hatred and revenge. It is not surprising that they should so regard him, for they but reflect the general opinion of contemporary pakehas. Even Greenwood, whose fine essay “The upraised Hand” is a careful and sympathetic account of the rise of the Ringatu faith which was founded by Te Kooti, is surprisingly content to accept and repeat the careless estimate of these contemporary historians, and to sum up his career, prior to his deportation to the Chathams, in Williams' phrase that he was “well known as one who was lightfingered and always getting into trouble.” Even the devil, it is said, should be given his due te Kooti has been given much less than his. His repu-

tation has been tarnished by half, and less than half-truths, and by an almost conscious suppression of much evidence which could, and should have been put forward to enable a correct assessment of his character, and much more important, his stature as a Maori leader, to be arrived at.