Tu'i Tonga Empire

A stone for the king's tomb

formationDrafted from Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894)

For generations before this story can be dated with any confidence, one title stood over the whole of Tonga: the Tui Tonga, lord of the soil, the men and the first-fruits, tribute-taker from Ha'apai, Vava'u, the Niuas, 'Uvea, Futuna and even distant Samoa. No man could say where the power had come from, unless the Tui Tonga were truly descended from the gods themselves - and no other chief in the islands held so much as a fraction of it unchallenged.

Power of that size, unchecked by any rival, wore the land down. Takalaua, a Tui Tonga remembered as strong and harsh, kept his fishermen working the bay out of Mu'a whatever the weather, and when they came home empty-handed he had the chief among them bound and readied for the knife before a promise of a beautiful woman bought back his life. Worse followed. Wanting a tomb greater than any of his fathers', Takalaua ordered the people of Belehake to drag a huge stone from the reef in the heart of the planting season, and when they begged to be allowed to sow their yams first and haul the stone after, his answer was that they were idle and had dishonoured him. They hauled anyway, through a day so long and so thirsty that by evening they were licking mud from a dry waterhole and cursing their king where he could not hear them.

Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894) · Tauʻolunga · CC BY-SA 3.0

Killed on the path to his bath

He did not need to hear them. That night two old men of Belehake, Tamajia and Malofafa, decided the matter for the rest. In the morning they met Takalaua on the path as he went down to bathe, killed him there, and cut the body into pieces so that none would know it, hiding the limbs in a tree in the grove above Mu'a. For the first time within living memory of the tradition, a Tui Tonga had died at his own people's hands rather than the gods'.

Word reached Takalaua's sons where they were racing toy canoes at Niutao. Of his several children, raised apart from their mother and from each other by a father's decree that no child of his should know his face, only the youngest, Lo-tawai, had ever been allowed near him

• and it was Lo-tawai alone who could say, when the body was found hanging in its basket in the sacred grove, "This is our father: I know the face for his face." The eldest, Kau-ulu-fonua, broke the mast of a canoe into pieces and handed one to each of his brothers and his sister as a summons to war, and led them out to bury their father and call the people to arms against his killers.

The savage

expansionDrafted from Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894)

Kau-ulu-fonua's murderers fled the moment his war party landed, and what followed was not a single battle but a chase down the whole length of the Tui Tonga's own tribute network. Driven from 'Eua, the killers ran to Ha'apai; driven from Ha'apai, to Vava'u; from Vava'u to Niuatoputapu, and from there before the wind to Niuafo'ou, the most remote of the northern islands. Still Kau-ulu-fonua followed. They fled again to Samoa and were driven out from there too, then to 'Uvea, and finally to Futuna - the western edge of everything the Tongans knew, with no land beyond it to run to.

British Museum · Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894) · John Hall · Public domain

Every island in that chase was a name on the list of places that had owed tribute to Takalaua. By the time Kau-ulu-fonua's canoes reached Futuna, his pursuit of two old men had become, in effect, a demonstration to the whole tribute network that the killing of a Tui Tonga bought no one their freedom from it.

The gods cannot even shield my back

At Futuna the fugitives had built a wall and waited, backed by islanders who marvelled at Kau-ulu-fonua's reputation and told him he owed his success not to his own courage but to the favour of the gods. He mocked them for it - "Then I will leave my back to the gods to defend, and myself defend my face" - and as he pressed through the gate of the wall, one of the old murderers wounded him in the back all the same. "The gods are fools," he is said to have cried, seizing the man who had wounded him with his own hands and holding him until his men broke through.

Both murderers were taken alive. Because they were old and had lost their teeth, Kau-ulu-fonua had them chew hard, dry kava root before him until their gums bled into the mixture, then made them strain and knead it themselves and drank the whole draught alone. From that single act came the name that stuck to him afterward - Kau-ulu-fonua Fekai, "the savage" - and with the killing of his father's murderers in Futuna, the pursuit that had run the length of the Tui Tonga's tribute network was finished. He sailed home to Tonga a chief whose reach no island in that network had escaped.

A chief to stand between

peakDrafted from Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894)

Home from Futuna, Kau-ulu-fonua called his brothers together and drew the lesson from his own father's death. "I am the chief," he told them, "but this people have dared to slay the Tui Tonga. What will they not dare? And how shall the land stand fast if the chief be slain? Now therefore it is my mind to set a chief over the people to govern them, and I will be supreme lord of the soil only, and of the offerings." He made his brother Mounga-motua lord over the people in his place, sent him to govern from the peninsula, and gave him the title Tui Ha'atakalaua.

It held. From that day forward, whatever wars broke out between rival chiefs in Tonga, the Tui Tonga himself passed through them unharmed - lord of the soil and of the tribute, but no longer within reach of the grievances a civil ruler collects. The killing that had opened Kau-ulu-fonua's own reign never repeated itself against a sacred Tui Tonga again.

A dignity built on the same idea twice over

The system this created governed Tonga at the height of its reach. The Tui Tonga held divine honours by virtue of an origin no one living could fully explain, hedged by tabu so strict that his own wife was taken from him after bearing him two children, lest there be more than one person alive of such transcendent rank at a time. His son inherited the title; his daughter outranked him - she was the Tui Tonga fefine, the female Tui Tonga, to whom even her own father owed the moemoe, the gesture of touching his forehead to her foot. Her own daughter in turn became the Tamaha, the highest earthly dignity of all, before whom neither mother nor grandfather could so much as eat.

Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894) · John Webber and William Sharp · Public domain

The Tui Ha'atakalaua held none of that inherited sanctity, but he held everything the sanctity could no longer safely carry: the ordering of tribute, the burden of civil government, and, in time, the executive authority that the Tui Tonga's own tabu made it dangerous for him to exercise himself. Two chiefs now stood where one had stood before - one who could not be touched by the politics of the islands he nominally owned, and one who governed those islands in his name and, increasingly, in his own.

The offerings only

endDrafted from Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894)

The arrangement Kau-ulu-fonua built to protect one Tui Tonga eventually finished dividing the power that had been his. Generations after Mounga-motua took the title Tui Ha'atakalaua, one of his own successors, Moungatonga, married a Samoan chief woman named Tohu'ia and had by her a son, Ngata. Moungatonga saw, as his own ancestor once had, that the people no longer honoured the chief they obeyed so much as the chief to whom they gave their offerings - and he judged that a second delegation would settle the imbalance a second time. He made Ngata lord over the people in his own place, gave him the title Tui Kanokubolu, and kept for himself only the offerings, exactly as Kau-ulu-fonua had once kept only the offerings for the Tui Tonga.

Working back from a king-list that runs unbroken to the reign of Tabuoji, the Tui Tonga who entertained Tasman's ships in 1643, the tradition places Ngata's assumption of the new title at about 1610. By then Tonga was governed, at least in principle, by three chiefs at once: a Tui Tonga who held the land, the gods and the tribute; a Tui Ha'atakalaua who had inherited the temporal authority Kau-ulu-fonua first delegated away; and now a Tui Kanokubolu who held the temporal authority the Tui Ha'atakalaua's own line had, in turn, found it safer to hand off. Every later ruling chief of Tonga - down to the line that produced King George Tupou, whom this same tradition still remembered generations afterward - descended from Ngata rather than from either of the two older titles.

Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894) · Isaack Gilsemans · Public domain

What the sacred office kept

None of this touched the Tui Tonga's own dignity. The office continued to be filled, generation after generation, by men whose birth alone qualified them, and continued to receive tribute and homage long after Ngata's line had become the effective government of the islands. Captain Cook, arriving in 1777, at first mistook a forceful island chief for the king of Tonga, and was corrected only when he watched that same chief perform the moemoe before a frail, elderly Tui Tonga named Pau. The gods, the soil and the offerings were still the Tui Tonga's alone. Everything else - the men, the wars, the government of a network of islands his ancestor Kau-ulu-fonua had once run down to its last hiding place in Futuna - belonged, by 1610, to lines the sacred office itself had chosen to create and could no longer call back.

Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894) · John Webber and J. Hall · Public domain