Looking for trouble in Tonga: a reply to Vomiting Diamonds

A blogger with the alarming name Vomiting Diamonds has criticised the emphases of my posts about Tongan history. Diamonds is a Marxist, and he believes that there is too little conflict in my picture of the Tongan past:

Anyway, where does class exploitation and resistance fits in to all this? It seems to me it's a bit in the background in all this somewhat abstract discussion of modes of production.

Diamonds makes a fair point. I do give the impression, in my previous blog post and in certain other posts I have made about modern Tonga, that rulers like King Tupou I and Queen Salote operated completely independently of any pressure from social forces. In my last post I praised documents like the Emancipation Edict of 1862 and the  of 1875 Constitution as historically progressive, yet gave the impression that they were the doing of Tupou, and Tupou alone, rather than the achievement of the sort of popular movement which is usually responsible for the success of progressive social measures.

Every society is a mixture of cohesion and conflict, but social scientists tend to disagree about whether the conflict or the cohesion is more worthy of study. Marxist historians, with their belief in the ubiquity and importance of class struggle, are likely to be disappointed with the emphases made by some of the leading scholars of the Tongan past.

The two pioneering scholars of nineteenth and twentieth century Tongan history are Ian Campbell and Sione Latukefu. In his book Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern Campbell brings together findings from archaeological digs, the scribblings of early European visitors to the Pacific, and a lot of economic data to create a lucid narrative of Tongan history. Latukefu, a Methodist minister as well as an academic, spent decades interviewing Tongans about the histories of their families, villages, and churches, and was thus able to escape the Eurocentrism of many palangi commentators on his society.

For any outsider interested in learning about Tongan history, Campbell and Latukefu provide very useful introductions. But both are inclined to emphasise the cohesion of Tongan society over the past century and a half, and neither gives much attention to the experiences of subaltern groups like poor farmers, urban labourers, criminalised youth, and inhabitants of isolated outer islands.

Campbell and Latukefu often give the impression that the course of Tongan history has been determined by  a handful of great men and women. Island Kingdom includes a couple of fascinating chapters on Tupou I's reforms of Tongan society, but these chapters leave us with the impression that these changes came about because of the wisdom of Tupou I and his close adviser, the Wesleyan missionary Shirley Baker, rather than because of anything the mass of Tongans said or did.

But there are hints in some of the work of younger scholars about how the limitations of Campbell and Latukefu might be surmounted.

In his book Tonga in Crisis the anthropologist and poet 'Okusitino Mahina compares the pro-democracy protests which culminated in the riot that razed half of Nuku'alofa in November 2007 with events in the nineteenth century:

[T]he introduction of Codes of Law beginning with the Vava'u Code in 1839, followed by the 1862 Emancipation Edict and the promulgation of the 1875 Constitution...were the direct results of major political upheavals that threw the whole of Tonga into some fifty years of bloody Civil Wars...Characterised by bloodshed, burning and destruction, these political and religious conflicts, which culminated in the promulgation of the 1875 Constitution, raise some serious questions. Should we embrace the 1875 Constitution and treat the political violence that led to its formation as a complete disgrace? Or, should we embrace the political violence and regard the Constitution as a total disgrace? 

Where Campbell and Latukefu often seem to regard the Civil Wars of the early nineteenth century as struggles between members of the Tongan elite - between chiefs using private armies to settle disputes over traditional kingships, and over religious doctrine - Mahina sees them as conflicts in which the Tongan masses are players. And where Campbell and Latukefu treat the Civil Wars as a temporary departure from the pattern of Tongan history, and regard Tupou I's accession to power in the 1830s and '40s as a restoration of normality and stability, Mahina argues that conflict continued, in one form or another, throughout the reign of Tupou. Measures like the 1875 Constitution were the product of this continuing conflict, not a reflection of its end. Unfortunately, Mahina did not have space to develop his interpretation of nineteenth century history in Tonga in Crisis.

If we wanted to flesh out Mahina's claims ourselves, we could do worse than deploy a technique EP Thompson developed during his researches into nineteenth and eighteenth century English history. Thompson was a man who spent decades railing against attempts to portray British society as traditionally cohesive rather than conflict-ridden, and who insisted that history had to be seen from the 'bottom up', through the eyes of subaltern groups, as well as through the narratives left by Prime Ministers and diplomats and generals.

As he worked his way through stodgy official histories, old government reports, and yellowing court records, Thompson learned to read between the lines of his material: to 'listen' for the voices of  marginalised and unfashionable individuals and groups. By attending to the oversights of official histories, and the lacunae in supposedly exhaustive documents, Thompson was able to reveal another side to his country's history.

I want to suggest how the Thompsonian technique might be applied to Tongan history by pointing to what I think is a significant silence in standard accounts of one of the most important phases of the country's nineteenth century civil wars.

After proclaiming himself King of Tonga in 1831, Tupou I began a long military campaign to unify his country, which had broken into warring statelets at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Tupou was an early Tongan convert to Christianity, and his campaign soon took on the character of a holy war.

After subduing all of his native Ha'apai archipelago in central Tonga, Tupou moved north, and took control of the Vava'u Islands. Soon Tupou was fighting on Tongatapu, the large southern island which has usually dominated Tonga. As the site of the traditional Tongan capital of Mu'a and tens of thousands of hectares of rich plantations, Tongatapu was indispensable to Tupou.

In 1835 a handful of Tongatapu chiefs converted from paganism to Christianity, and established, with the help of a few British missionaries, a fortified settlement around a church in Nuku'alofa, on the northern coast of the island. Tupou arrived with an army in 1837, after pagan forces besieged the little outpost of Christendom. Tupou's troops relieved the siege, and made a series of attacks on pagan villages in the interior of Tongatapu. As each village fell to the holy warriors, its people were slaughtered. Several historians have suggested that the missionaries in Nuku'alofa goaded Tupou into these massacres, by quoting some of the gorier passages of the Old Testament to him.

Although Tupou appeared to pacify much of Tongatapu in 1837, his rule was not accepted by the survivors of his invasion, and in 1840 he was forced to mount a new campaign against his pagan enemies.

During his second war for Tongatapu Tupou made a radical change in tactics. Gathering his army outside Kolovai, a pagan stronghold on the western tip of Tongatapu, he made a speech without precedent in Tongan history:

We did wrong in the last war when we did not fight as Christians; then our object was not to save but to destroy. Now, I tell you all that we must not fight in that way again. If the enemy come out of their fort tomorrow morning, every man must try to seize them, but not to shoot them, except in a case of life or death.

For a fortnight Tupou's army sat outside Kolovai's high earth walls, waiting for its enemies to surrender. The soldiers inside the fortress were mostly serfs, who had been compelled to take up arms by the chiefs whose lands they worked. As word of Tupou's speech reached them, they began to sneak out of the fortress. When Tupou finally advanced on Kolovai the fort's depleted garrison surrendered immediately.

After the fall of Kolovai, Tongatapu's pagan chiefs began peace talks with Tupou, and the war soon petered out. When another rebellion against his rule broke out on Tongatapu in 1852, Tupou used the tactic which had defeated his enemies at Kolovai. Once again, mass desertions took the wind out of the rebels. After 1852 Tupou never faced another armed uprising.

Historians have tended to treat the defeat of the 1840 and 1852 rebellions as evidence of Tupou's wisdom and political nous. There has been little discussion, though, about how Tupou's tactic of peacefully waiting out his enemies could have enjoyed such remarkable success. What made the soldiers of villages like Kolovai so ready to defy their chiefs by throwing down their arms and deserting their posts? Why was the pagan feudal class of Tongatapau, which had for hundreds of years raised powerful armies, suddenly unable to put up a fight against a Christian upstart from Ha'apai? Is it possible that Tupou was able to triumph peacefully over the rebels of 1840 and 1852 because he made an informal alliance with a peasantry that was ready to revolt against its traditional masters?

When we ponder these questions we need to remember the origins and development of feudalism on Tongatapu.

The Lapita people, the ancestors of today's Polynesians, brought a relatively egalitarian society with them when they colonised Tonga three thousand years ago. Based as it was on fishing and small-scale farming, the Lapita economy was incapable of generating the sort of surplus that could support a privileged and idle class.

Over millennia, though, Tongatapu's inhabitants developed a sophisticated and highly productive system of agriculture to support their growing population. A chiefly class rose to appropriate the surplus produced by this economy; priests and poets were deployed to justify and beautify the privileges of this new class. When Cook arrived on Tongatapu in 1773 he found a fantastically stratified society. Chiefs regarded the serfs who worked their estates as members of a different race, and denied that they had souls.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, though, the feudal order was destabilised. New-fangled muskets and cannons upset the balance of power between chiefs and emboldened raiders from northern islands; Christianity undermined old religious apologies for the powerful. The need for firearms and other European goods led chiefs to sell or barter much of their harvests to traders, rather than offer it to the priests, poets, and sacred king who lived in Mu'a. Young serfs could dream of escaping their lot by leaping aboard a passing European ship or enlisting in the army of some enemy of their chief.

In 1839, after taking advice from some missionaries, Tupou had created the 'Vava'u Code', Tonga's first set of written laws. The Vava'u Code ordered chiefs to give their serfs a fair amount of land to farm for subsistence purposes, asserted the universality of human rights under Christianity, and demanded that every able-bodied Tongan perform useful work. The Vava'u Code foreshadowed the Emancipation Edict, which removed serfs from the control of chiefs, and the Constitution of 1875, which transferred chiefs' properties to the state. Although it was a modest document, compared to the reforms that were to come, the Vava'u Code nevertheless announced that Tupou would not tolerate some of the old excesses of the chiefs.

News of Tupou's Christian religion and his irreverent attitude toward some Tongan shibboleths would have preceded his arrival on Tongatapu. Is it possible that the willingness of the defenders of villages like Kolovai to capitulate to Tupou I was in part a declaration of no confidence in Tongatapu's local feudal class? Did Tupou, with his attacks on the privileges of the chiefs, his Christian rhetoric about the brotherhood of man, and his promise not to mistreat captured enemies, seem like a potential ally to some of Tongatapu's beleagured peasants? Is some sort of peasant rebellion hidden by conventional accounts of the 1840 and 1852 wars on Tongatapu?

[Posted by Maps/Scott]