CHILDHOOD

Te Ao Hou, November 1957, Page 19

CHILDHOOD The published accounts of Te Kooti's childhood are few and meagre. They were gathered by interested pakehas after Te Kooti became famous. They are highly likely to have been coloured by later events. Lambert seems to have gathered some material about Te Kooti's childhood from old Maori identities who would have been alive at the time, and J. A. McKay did some assiduous scratching a generation later. Occasionally I have got together with a few old people and have managed to get the subject of Te Kooti introduced and once they got started there has been a flood of minor corroborative detail concerning at least the two main stories told by Lambert and repeated, with added detail by McKay. The first is the story that a tohunga named Toiroa told Te Kooti's mother while she was pregnant, that the child in her womb was destined for great good or great evil. The second story is that Te Kooti's early childhood was marked by such propensities for evil that the tohunga caused him to be shut away in a ruakumera with the earth piled high against the door to prevent his escape. The boy (his name in those days was Rikirangi te Turuki), is said to have escaped through the intervention of superhuman powers He was then handed over to the missionaries for education. It is fairly certain that Te Kooti did receive some sort of a pakeha education at the Williams missionary school. Greenwood, in his ‘Upraised Hand’ states that he was educated at the mission-school at Waerenga-a-hika, but this is palpably a mistake, for the Waerenga-a-hika school was not opened until 1857. There is some doubt about Te Kooti's age, his followers stated on his memorial that he was 79 when he died, while McKay does not think he was more than in his mid-sixties. But even taking the latter estimate he would have been a man of 27, if not older, when the Waerenga-a-hika school opened. As nearly as I have been able to ascertain Te Kooti attended the earlier mission school at Whakato, near Manutuke in Poverty Bay, somewhere about the year 1846 at which time he would have been in his teens. I have been told that he was there when Samuel Williams went there to teach, which was in 1846–7. The actual site of the Whakato mission is now marked by the grounds of a fine carved house, named Whakato, which was erected about 1883 to commemorate the site of the first missionary enterprise on that site. It seems that Te Kooti, or Rikirangi as he then was, was a promising pupil. He appears to have had an ambition to be a catechist, or a Maori lay reader, but the Bishop seems to have rejected the idea on the grounds that the lad was more interested in the warlike tales of the old testament than in the peaceful message of the new. It is evident, however, that the Williams family held the lad in some esteem for when he was baptised into the Christian faith they bestowed on him the name of Coates, after the Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, James Danderson Coates. It is by the Maori version of this name, Kooti (pronounced kor-tay), that he was ever afterwards known, his full name after baptism being Te Kooti Rikirangi te Turuki. In my next article I will re-examine the evidence concerning Te Kooti's character and reputation prior to his unjust deportation to the Chatham Islands.