Human Rights & Democracy Movement

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT IN TONGA
(By ‘Epeli Hau’ofa)

This paper focuses on the changing social environment in which the call by an increasing number of commoner Tongans for a truly democratic form of Government has emerged. Although movement for democracy are a world-wide phenomenon, each society exhibits characteristics peculiar to its development because of its distinctive historical and social environmental circumstances. It is these circumstances inherent in our social system that I wish to address.

I begin with the general observation that when the control of social and economic forces in a society shifts from one section of the community that had traditionally monopolised it, to another section, it is inevitable that the newly empowered unit begins to assert itself in demanding a share of institutionalised authority commensurate with its strength.

Conversely, when the ruling section of a community loses control of the productive and other social forces in the society, its ability to govern effectively for the welfare of the community weakens accordingly. In such a situation the ruling section generally acts and reacts in ways that intensify the challenge to its political legitimacy. In the end it will have to adapt to the changed and changing environment either by agreeing to a new re-allocation of rights to govern, or by stiffening its resistance using whatever means it can still command. This however, is resistance from an already shaken position.

The re-alignment of forces within the Tongan society today reflects closely the pattern of political development sketched above. As I shall shortly try to demonstrate, the ruling aristocratic section of our national community has declined. On the other hand the commoner section is gaining power from which position of strength it is demanding a commensurate share of the rights to decide on matters that concern its interests and welfare, that is, the interests and welfare of ninety nine per cent of the population. Thus beneath the calls that have resounded over the past few years for accountability in public affairs, and for more ethical behaviour on the part of our national leaders, are demands by the newly empowered for a restructuring of the institutional arrangements in our society.

The decline of one section of our community and the rise into prominence of another section became apparent only in the last fifteen or so years. But the beginnings of these connected processes go right back to the reign of Tupou I and the promulgation of our Constitution, one of the oldest written constitutions in the world. The new order established by Tupou I and his advisors through the Codes and the Constitution, sowed the very seeds for the decline of the aristocracy, the ascendancy of the commoner class, and through this, the need for a constitutional reform today.

In this regard, the first relevant aspect of the new order was the drastic reduction of the number of land controlling titled chiefs from at least a hundred to around thirty. Traditionally in Polynesia, as elsewhere, the material basis of chiefly power was the control of lands and people living on them. Chiefly lines that lost territorial control slipped into insignificance and most eventually disappeared. Thus the reduction of the number of estate holding Tongan chiefs led to the fall or the disappearance of most minor titles and the numerical weakening of the aristocratic rank. Since the middle of the twentieth century, when the population began to increase rapidly, the aristocratic proportion of the total population has been falling behind. Numbers alone do not necessarily indicate strength; but when numbers are combined with social and economic powers, they become significant indeed. In any human group there is always an optimum number below which the group cannot function effectively in relation to other groups, even when the dice is loaded in its favour.

Thus especially from the late 1960s with the rapid expansion in the public and private sectors of our society, the numerical and other related disadvantages of the aristocracy began to fall. Apart from positions that could be filled through political appointments that favour the aristocracy, most strategic posts in the public sector went to commoners, the only ones with talent and training to occupy them. The same was and is true of the private sector.

Second, the constitutional provision relating to primogenital succession has robbed the aristocracy of the great qualities of field leadership that were historically associated with them. In the past, chiefs, especially high chiefs, were selected from among eligible contenders by their peers. And because they were expected to be the managers of production within their territories, to actually rule their people, and to defend them against external aggression, only the fit and able could succeed to titles and hold them. Tupou I personified those qualities in his long struggle to accede to power and to mould a new nation. He did not become a monarch by virtue of birth alone; he had to overcome his rivals by actually demonstrating to them that he was far stronger, more skilful and wiser than they were. The primogenital succession initiated by him and ensconced in the Constitution, was designed to prevent the kinds of competition and rivalry that had led to much violence in the past. He should know, for he himself had suffered from and had triumphed over it. But ironically, the measure that he instituted removed all tests of fitness for office. Competition, in fact is very important in that it weeds out the weak and the unsuitable, and brings forth and enhances the strength of character. It enlivens a group keeping its members fit, experienced and mentally alert.

Apart from birth order, the only other criterion related to Tongan succession is a negative one, the disqualification on the ground of imbecility. But as we all know one can be a certified idiot in more than a thousand non-medically proven ways. However, the criteria of birth order and imbecility weaken any kind of succession for they foreclose the selection of the most able. The removal of the competitive factor from accession to power within a ruling group makes people take things for granted, and saps much of its verve and life rendering it ill-suited to command effectively in any social field where in competition reigns supreme.

Third, the abolition of compulsory tribute to chiefs, in the forms of labour and produce, has further eroded the strength of the aristocracy. Since 1862 chiefs have been forbidden to demand labour or produce from the people living on their estates. The implications of this go far beyond the loss to them of their main sources of wealth and therefore much of their power. It effectively ended one of the most pivotal roles chiefs played in society: the management of economic production within their territories. This measure together with the individualisation of land rights removed chiefs from direct participation in the wider economy.

The development of the monetised sector of the national economy from the late nineteenth century and through the first half of the present century was an alien development controlled by a relatively small number of European planters and traders. Most Tongans however, remained in the semi-subsistence peasant sector, producing for their own consumption and selling their surpluses to the traders for target income. The aristocracy benefited from this arrangement not through active participation in the management of production or distribution but in receiving rents from leases on their estates, and traditional tributes which Tongans still paid, albeit voluntarily as part of their felt traditional obligations, and with the passage of time on a diminishing scale. With the increasing marginalisation of the peasant sector the economic significance of traditional tributes declined markedly. The important point to note here is that a class of people who were once economic managers who also controlled the society-wide redistribution system, has been transformed by circumstances into a class of recipients. Such a transformation makes the people concerned ill-prepared to act in the hugely competitive world of an open, free market economy.

When the commercial sector of the economy was thrown open to Tongans after the Second World War, in part because of the emigration of most Europeans and part Europeans who had controlled it, and when that sector expanded from the late 1960s on, it was the commoners who had been seasoned with toil, and who had looked to education and skills training as avenues for their social salvation, who were equipped to move into that sector to establish themselves. Fortunes varied; many fell by the wayside, but some have succeeded to become wealthier than most of the aristocracy. Thus with a few exceptions, the wealthiest and most economically powerful Tongans today are commoners. The same dominance obtains when we look into the fields of education, the trades and the professions. The two most notable exceptions from the aristocratic economic inertia have been the present Monarch and the former Prime Minister, who had for decades been operating commercial production on their estates.

The new land tenure system introduced by Tupou I empowered a small group of the aristrocacy, mainly the high chiefs now called nobles, and simultaneously rendered them impotent. The fact then and now that chiefly estates are divided into blocks allotted to individuals whose tenures are protected by the state, means that chiefs have lost their traditional power to wilfully remove people from their estates. Those whose allotments are registered in their names with the appropriate Ministry are assured of holding their tenures and transmiting them to their heirs. By 1975 sixty per cent of allotments had been registered and more were being registered. Of the remaining allotments people can claim long occupancy rights, and the state is known to have upheld some of these claims. Finally, primogeniture forecloses the rights of chiefs to play a meaningful role in the transmission of tenure rights from one generation to the next. It may be added here that although the monarch is the titular owner of all lands in the kingdom, he cannot dispossess noble title-holders of their estates. Thus everyone with a tenure has a measure of protection guaranteed by the Constitution and the laws of the land. However, the important point is that the order instituted by Tupou I has adversely affected the power of the aristocracy.

We can now see another probable reason why the aristocracy have long remained aloof from the field of wider economic production: they have not only lost their traditional right to command labour and produce from their people; the ultimate rights to control the disposition of most land parcels within their estates are now vested in the state, and in the primogenital inheritance provision of the Constitution.

Before the era of Tupou I there existed titled chiefs of various grades above the level of the ‘ulumotu’a, the heads of the minimal territorial units. There were minor chiefly titles and grades of higher territorial chiefs who formed a chain of command from the top of the social pyramid down to the commoners.

This closely graded hierarchy constituted intricately interwoven networks of kinship ties that helped unite the entire society. The dispossession of minor chiefly titles and their subsequent fall or disappearance from the socio-political arena severed most of these links, further isolating the high chiefs from the population at large. In short, the strength of kinship bonds that had traditionally united the Tongan society from the top to the bottom strata has been weakening with each passing generation.

In the past, the aristocracy monopolised the entire field of cultural and technical knowledge then available in the country. Commoners were referred to as they still are sometimes, as “me’avale”, ‘the ignorant’. This was literally true for the rank and file of the lowest class were kept in the dark because knowledge was power, and those who had and strictly guarded it, wielded power over others. Then came the Christian missionaries whose aim was to save everyone’s soul. The new education system which they introduced was therefore made available to everyone for their own individual salvation. Thus the new knowledge and training in new skills, was eagerly sought after by Tongan commoners leaving the aristocracy to nurse the kinds of knowledge that were increasingly irrelevant for the conduct of everyday affairs in the changing social-economic environment. This voracious appetite for knowledge remains today, and has in fact earned for our people a reputation among our other fellow islanders. The point here is that the universalisation of knowledge and learning broke one of the main strangleholds that the aristocracy had over the people. In the past three decades in particular a rapidly increasingly number of ordinary Tongans have received higher level education and have therefore aquired a greater awareness of the world and their potential to excel, as well as a growing confidence in their ability, and their new place in an evolving society. To try to force these people to keep to their ascribed place into which they were born, as some have tried to do, is to act with self-delusion because that is another place, another time.

In the three remaining truly aristocratic societies of the South Pacific (Tonga, Fiji and Samoa), Tongan chiefs have the least control of and influence on the daily life of their people. The only area where the aristocracy exerts any meaningful control at all is at the apex of the state structure: in parliament, the cabinet, the Privy Council, and to a diminishing degree, the bureaucracy, through political appointment. This is their last remaining bastion of power. Their resistance against democracy is thus explained. And it is entirely human: no one relinquishes his or her main sources of livelihood and power without resistance.

Most of the factors that have contributed to the structural weakening of the aristocracy have also been factors for the independence and empowerment of the commoner class. Our progressive absorption into the world economic and cultural system has supplied the specific means for the rise of the ordinary people of our country. These means are rooted internationally and no tiny, local endogamous group anywhere can command them by the mere flat of constitutionally sanctioned right of birth. They can only be mastered by talent, training and performance in the open, competitive market place. This is where the commoner class of Tonga has its greatest advantage. Comprising ninety nine percent of the population, this class, by virtue of its sheer numerical supremacy, commands the pool of talents needed for the development of a modernising society operating within an extremely complex international system. It is from this pool that the call for a renewed national covenant has come. The call has come from the ranks of those upon whom the country depends for its social, economic and spiritual advancement; from the ranks of those who actually hold the strength of the nation.

In saying what I have said I did not wish to write the aristocracy off, far from it. My intention has been to analyse some changing structural features of our society in order to deepen our understanding of what is happening and the circumstances that have led to the impasse that we, all Tongans of whatever class, face together today. The present Constitution has guided us in the last one hundred and twenty years. We all know the benefits that we have reaped from the Constitution. But so far we have heard only of the constraints that some of its provisions, and the laws that have emerged from it, have placed on the majority of Tongans. What I hope to have achieved in this paper is to show that these provisions and laws have also adversely affected the interests of the aristocracy. In short, in our present circumstances, the Constitution is no longer adequate for commoners and for the aristocracy alike. There is therefore, a real and urgent case of reform.

I would like to end this paper with the following concluding remarks. Like everything else, the aristocracy is changing, and there are very encouraging signs of re-invigoration in its ranks. In general the current heirs to noble titles, together with their siblings, like other young people of their generation, are far better educated than their parental and grandparental generations. Like their peers in the commoner ranks, some of them have secured university degrees or other certificates, and have earned through merit their postings in the public sector. A few have even moved into the private sector, some in partnership with their commoner peers. From the little that I have seen, they do not think that by virtue of birth alone they are better or worse than anyone else. With others in their generation they have gone through the same baptism of fire in the rigour of training in the open marketplace of learning and have emerged tried, tested and ready to face life.

Although the aristocracy will always be few in number, Tonga will continue to need from them far more than their social and economic contributions to our progress. Like their ancestors past and present, they serve the nation in ways that no one else can; and therein, I believe, lies their great and continuing importance. They are the foci of our culture and our identity as a single people, as well as being the signposts of our historical continuity as a nation. Our remembered past is inextricably bound up with the rising and falling fortunes of our leading lineages. And so has been the case with our documented history from the turn of the nineteenth century, as I have tried to show in this paper. We have travelled together with our aristocracy for over a thousand years, and their leadership has given us reasons to be proud of our history, our heritage and ourselves as a nation. We will still travel together with them albeit along new and yet uncharted routes into the end of this century and into the next millenium.

We still expect to see in our aristocracy, as in no other group in our society, the ideal qualities of our collective personality. In our hurly-burly, free-for-all modern society, we look to them for such qualities in social interaction as civility, graciousness, kindness, and that calming aura of a unifying presence in our midst. This may explain why we get very disappointed whenever they behave as mere mortals, exhibiting the follies and foibles that are the lot of humanity in general. Perhaps we have been expecting too much from them. Nevertheless, they are part of us as we are part of them, and have always been so. And although developments in the past decades have brought us into confrontation with some of them, we as Tongas have maintained a sense of profound respect and an abiding affection for them. They also feel the same for us despite our differences. We have an expression, “’oku tau fepahia’aki” (We are fed up with each other”) which we utter when we get exasperated with members of our own families. We never really mean it. That is why I have a certain degree of confidence that in the near future we will get together with our leaders and work out a new national consensus that will take us into the next century as a revitalised community, and a stronger, even more united people.

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