Our rituals aren’t comic

Ican’t remember an image riling me more than the smirk on the face of English captain Owen Farrell last Saturday, facing the All Blacks haka. It wasn’t just a subtle smirk; it was arrogant and theatrical. It was the smirk of a villain walking free from a courthouse. It would have inspired bloodshed in a congregation of Quakers, and I wanted to bop him on the nose, which I’m sure was just the effect he was after.

It was colonialism at play after that as the pasty English, pastier than ever in their white uniforms, charged around the field at Yokohama like miniature tanks. They won. So what?

‘‘I will never not find New Zealand’s haka completely stupid,’’ wrote one of Farrell’s English fans as debate over the smirk gained traction.

I know how she feels. I feel like that about ignorant Poms who still think England rules the world and the world should be grateful, who think they did this country a favour when they planted their flag and began ripping off Ma¯ ori, just as they’d ripped off the native people of every country they took over at gunpoint.

Wherever the English went racism went, and the wounds are still bleeding.

They did nobody a favour but themselves, however pompously they might claim otherwise. It was only ever about money and power; theirs. It was a hunt for resources to enrich the old country and deplete the new.

We’re only beginning to face colonisation and its lasting negative effects on Ma¯ ori. There will be brawls ahead over what we teach our kids in schools, having taught them, until now, almost nothing of their own country’s history.

In my day we learned it from Weet-Bix cards. I was shocked to learn Ma¯ ori women were raped at Parihaka, the Taranaki stronghold of pacifism invaded by armed settlers and the English military, bent on grabbing tribal land they weren’t legally entitled to in the 19th century. They thought they’d scored a triumph, I guess, but it was theft.

There were thefts like it all over the country, and we grumble when Ma¯ ori are compensated – in money – when what was stolen was not so much money as identity, heritage, self-respect, a complex, lived culture.

The thought of rape along with everything else is sickening. I was naı¨ve. I thought the women would have been spared that humiliation, but I should have known better. It was war after all.

We used to call them Ma¯ ori Wars. More truthfully, we now talk about the Land Wars or the New Zealand Wars. If this was America we’d have made westerns glorifying ourselves, but we didn’t. Geoff Murphy eventually made Utu, which gave a Ma¯ ori perspective on history.

That’s a thing about New Zealanders that Farrell and the many Poms like him don’t get. We don’t denigrate Ma¯ ori culture here. We’ve learned better.

I relate more to the haka than to any English ritual I can think of. The Changing of the Guard? Don’t make me laugh. We still have the comic opera traditions in Parliament, we still have their Queen, but that will end one day, and we’ll be ourselves, a hybrid of cultures with their own histories, in which English will be just one of many.

Farrell will live to play many more games of rugby, and will inevitably be beaten. I hope he’ll face loss with dignity. But that’s a bit much to ask of a young man of 28 at the height of his powers. The smirk said it all.