The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (51 page)

From 950 to 1865 the office of Tui Tonga passed through 39 men, most of them firstborn sons of firstborn sons. The first Tui Tongas exercised both religious and secular authority. In many cases the oral history specifies which Tui Tonga is buried in a particular langi. Having such information is every archaeologist’s dream.

The dynamic and competitive nature of Tongan leadership is exemplified in the lives of the Tui Tongas. Little is known of the semidivine Ahoeitu. The tenth Tui Tonga, Momo, established his paramount village at a place called Heketa.

Momo’s successor, Tuitatui, built an exceptional monument at Heketa. Called the Trilithon, this monument was like a gateway arch composed of three immense stones. The two upright stones represented the chief’s sons, Lafa and Talaihaapepe; each stone was 15 to 17 feet tall and weighed 30 to 40 tons. The lintel spanning the two uprights symbolized the two sons’ inseparable bond; it was 19 feet long and 4.5 feet wide. These stones had been cut with stone axes, transported on sleds like those used by Naga stone-pullers, and set upright using earthen ramps. As long as the arch stood, it was said, Tuitatui’s sons dared not quarrel.

The 12th Tui Tonga moved his paramount village to Lapaha on the shore of the lagoon, where it remained for six centuries. The 15th Tui Tonga is suspected of being the one who sent canoeloads of warriors to Western Samoa between
A.D.
1200 and 1250. Both Havea I (the 19th) and Havea II (the 22nd) were assassinated. These murders were probably plotted by rival Tongan chiefs; reportedly, however, they had to be carried out by Fijian “hit men” because it was taboo for a Tongan to touch his own paramount chief. By 1450 this taboo seems to have weakened, because the 23rd Tui Tonga was assassinated by his own countrymen. His son, Kauulufonua I, avenged his father’s death by running the killers to ground.

Around 1470 Kauulufonua I became the 24th Tui Tonga and announced that his firstborn son, Vakafuhu, would be his successor. He then did something that would alter Tongan history: he created the title of Tui Haa Takalaua for his second son, Moungamotua. By so doing, Kauulufonua I divided rulership between a sacred chief (the Tui Tonga) and a secular chief (the Tui Haa Takalaua).

Having dual chiefs seemed like a great way to frustrate future assassins, since it would be difficult to murder both men. With the passage of time, however, the secular chiefly line would become increasingly active and powerful; meanwhile, the sacred chiefs, in Goldman’s view, deteriorated into indolent, self-indulgent womanizers. For example, Uluakimata I, the 29th Tui Tonga, assembled a harem of 200 women and built himself Lapaha’s most spectacular burial mound.

Here we see a widespread process in rank societies: a junior lineage splits off from a senior lineage and, after years of effort, overtakes the latter in power and influence.

This was not the last bifurcation of chiefly Tongan lineages. Sometime before 1610, the 7th Tui Haa Takalaua gave his younger brother the title Tui Kanokupolu, assigning to him the day-to-day administration of chiefly affairs. Unfortunately, the Tui Haa Takalaua lineage became extinct after only 13 generations. This left only the sacred Tui Tonga and secular Tui Kanokupolu lineages. In 1865 the 39th and final Tui Tonga died. That left the archipelago in the hands of the 19th Tui Kanokupolu, who promptly renamed himself King George I.

The Tongan Social Hierarchy

Let us look now at Tongan society. Goldman assigns it to his stratified category, a reasonable decision given how great the inequality was between high chiefs and commoners. Chiefs were considered so different from commoners that different terms were used for the parts of their body. Commoners kneeled or assumed postures of obeisance in the chief’s presence. Chiefs sometimes sat cross-legged on a stack of woven mats, letting commoners touch the soles of their feet as a sign of subservience. Many chiefs wore feather headdresses and were tattooed with special symbols. Like Africa’s Bemba chiefs, they had the power to mutilate commoners who offended them.

The mana possessed by the Tui Tonga was so dangerous that the Tongans created a separate earthen mound for the burial of his hair clippings, blood, and bodily wastes. Chiefs had their own special bathing holes, fans, and fly whisks. They received the first fruits of every harvest and the first fish of every catch. Only the back, head, chest, and rump of a pig were suitable for a chiefly meal; any part that routinely touched the earth was rejected.

The children of high chiefs maintained separate houses and servants. Chiefly daughters were kept out of the sun, scented with flowers, rubbed with candlenut oil, and prevented from overeating. Because these young women were crucial to the creation of chiefly marriage alliances, their legs were tied together at night to prevent them from taking lovers.

Gifford supplies us with an anecdote that illustrates the Tongan reverence for hereditary authority. We have already mentioned that the 19th Tui Tonga was assassinated, possibly by Fijian contract killers. In fact, he was cut in half while bathing, and only his upper half was recovered. This left his corpse incomplete for burial. A lesser chief named Lufe offered to be killed and bisected so that his lower half could be joined to the dead paramount’s upper half. His relatives took him at his word.

When a high chief died, his
matapules,
or titled ceremonial attendants, took charge of the funeral. One served as undertaker while another supervised the quarrying and hauling of stones for the chief’s burial mound. The chief’s body, anointed with oils and fanned continuously with a fly whisk, lay in state for days. His brain and intestines were removed, much as the ancient Egyptian embalmers did with their pharaohs. Undertakers were normally paid for their work with gifts of palm mats and
tapa,
or bark cloth; when the tomb of the eighth Tui Haa Takalaua was reopened, however, it was discovered that his undertaker had also been honored by being buried with his chief.

A chief’s funeral required an initial spectacular feast, followed by 10 to 20 days of lesser feasting. The favored meat was pork, while the ritual beverage of choice was
kava,
a drink brewed from the root of an aromatic pepper plant. Commoners singed off their hair in mourning; elite mourners sang songs of grief; torches were lit all night, and the chief’s burial mound was decorated with colored stones.

However stratified these descriptions make the Tongans sound, the fact is that their society was still not completely divided into two class-endogamous strata. Instead, Tongan society has been described as a great tree with limbs, branches, and twigs extending outward from its noble trunk. In Gifford’s words each patrilineage consisted of “a nucleus of related chiefs about whom are grouped inferior relatives, the lowest and most remote of whom are commoners.”

Tongan chiefs, however, referred to themselves as if they belonged to a separate stratum. They called themselves
tui
(major lords) or
eiki
(lesser chiefs), while commoners were called
tua.
There were also
popula,
or slaves, mostly prisoners of war, and
hopoate,
or “strangers,” mostly shipwreck survivors. There were, in addition, terms for what seem to have been bureaucratic offices: matapule (titled attendants who were allowed to wear tapa cloth);
takanga
(untitled attendants with fewer privileges); local governors and stewards (who kept the chief apprised of problems in their districts); and
eikisi’i
(renowned warriors who, like ancient Colombia’s “nobles by command,” were granted the privileges of a petty chief).

Tongan Power Sharing

We saw in earlier chapters that even the most powerful chiefs shared power with councillors or advisers of some kind. The Tui Tonga was advised by a quartet of ministers known as the
falefa
(“four houses”), who built their residences near his. They attended the Tui Tonga, influenced his decisions, supervised work on his personal garden plot, drank kava with him, and sometimes could be bribed to orchestrate his assassination.

Further power sharing resulted from the premise that, within any group of siblings, the females were thought to possess more mana than the males. Thus while the office of Tui Tonga went to a man, he was outranked by his sister, who was known as the Tui Tonga Fefine. She was treated like a queen throughout Tonga, and her firstborn daughter, the Tamaha, also outranked her uncle. Gifford reports that even the most powerful Tui Tonga, who was carried from place to place on a litter and had the power to mutilate his subjects, allowed the Tamaha to place her foot on his head.

This inequality between noble brothers and sisters provided logical contradictions when selecting a spouse. That is, the firstborn son of the Tui Tonga could be outranked by the firstborn sons of the Tui Tonga Fefine and the Tamaha. To avoid such problems, Patrick Kirch reveals, the Tui Tonga Fefine might be married to a Samoan or Fijian chief who was outside the Tongan system. Another strategy was to marry the Tamaha to a secular chief like the Tui Haa Takalau, whose lineage was separate from that of the sacred Tui Tonga.

There were several outcomes to this jockeying for rank. One is that, according to Kirch, noble houses on Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa established long-term patterns of intermarriage. The resulting familiarity with all three archipelagoes probably facilitated some of the Tongan invasions mentioned earlier. Another outcome was the relaxation of incest taboos; first cousins could marry, even though they were called “brothers” and “sisters” in the Tongan language.

Land and Power in Tonga

At the heart of the Tongan invasions of other islands was an important difference between the aspirations of Samoan and Tongan chiefs. Samoan ali’i, as we have seen, wanted to accumulate noble titles. Tongan chiefs wanted garden land.

In Samoa and Fiji, land was the corporate property of clans or villages. In Tonga, all agricultural land was controlled by the Tui Tonga but could be delegated to lesser chiefs. Commoners might be given permission to create gardens on the high chief’s land, but in the end the chief could take anything he wanted. On Tongatapu alone, seven tracts were set aside for the Tui Tonga.

Most chiefs also controlled the best fishing areas. Only commoners who lived on the coast could fish; those who lived inland were limited to trading yams, taro, and fruits for fish. The first fish from each catch, like the thighs of sacrificed animals delivered to Kachin chiefs, went to the Tui Tonga.

The wealth generated by gardens and fishing stations gave Tongan chiefs added incentive to invade resource-rich areas such as Western Samoa. Chiefly monopoly of resources also denied lesser nobles a way to support their followers, undermining the traditional continuum of rank based on sacred life force.

The Role of Tongan Warfare

As in many societies we have considered, toa gave nonelite warriors a route to prominence. Anyone who brought back the heads of ten or more enemies might be raised to the rank of titled attendant or petty chief. Such a man was allowed to drink kava with the high chief.

Tongan warfare was more formal than that of Samoa. Up to 200 men could be used at one time, organized into
matanga
(companies) and
kongakau
(regiments). The battle commander was usually a chief of medium rank, accompanied by assistants (lesser chiefs or titled attendants) who transmitted his orders. Chiefs watched the battle from their litters, but they rarely took part.

To the beat of drums the regiments followed scouting parties into enemy territory. Battles were preceded by lots of kava drinking and trash-talking. Attackers carried bows and arrows and spears and clubs, and defenders built camouflaged traps filled with sharpened stakes. The greatest military insult was to drink coconut milk while sitting on the chest of a captive.

The Logic of Inequality in Tonga

We are now in a position to list some of the premises of Tongan social logic. Many of these premises were identified by Goldman years ago; our contribution has merely been to add a few more.

  1. Our sacred chiefs are descended from the Sky God and a mortal woman.

  2. Their semidivine origin entitles them to the products of all garden land and prime fishing areas.

  3. Senior lineages outrank the junior lineages that split off from them.

  4. A firstborn offspring outranks later siblings of the same sex.

  5. Among siblings, sisters and their daughters outrank brothers and their sons.

  6. The head of each family, however, should be a male.

  7. Political offices, as well, should be filled by males.

  8. No two persons in the same family hold the same rank.

  9. In order to ensure the high rank of one’s children, cousins can marry each other, even though they are classified as siblings in the Tongan language.

10. In order to ensure the supremacy of a chief’s children, his more highly ranked sister should marry into a different chiefdom.

11. A chief’s principal wife should be the most highly ranked woman available.

12. To satisfy premise 11, a chief may have to import his principal wife from a different chiefdom or marry a close relative (premise 9).

13. No Tongan dares assassinate his own chief, owing to the latter’s high levels of mana.

14. Assassins from other islands, however, can be hired to kill a Tongan chief.

15. Dividing authority, by creating a line of secular chiefs that will coexist with sacred chiefs, makes political assassination more difficult.

16. Secular chiefs, however, pose the threat of usurpation.

17. To reduce the risk of usurpation, the sacred chief should limit the land (and other resources) allocated to the secular chief.

Tongan society, as we suggested earlier, stood at the threshold of true stratification. All that remained was to draw a line across the continuum of rank, separating the elite trunk of the tree from the commoner branches and twigs.

We have one more task to perform before moving on to the creation of true social strata: we need to look in detail at the Tongan chiefly center of Lapaha. So much is known of Lapaha’s buildings and pyramidal mounds that the site can be used as a framework for understanding spectacular chiefly centers elsewhere in the ancient world.