‘Do I scare them?’
On being a black-skinned mayor
The n-word is alive and kicking in all its potent, ugly, spiteful, reptilian, nails-on-the-blackboard power. I’ve heard it uttered before, but never from amayor. And wow, this one just said it again!
K Gurunathan says he and his family were treated like ‘‘plantation n-words’’ when he was growing up. It is amaster class in racial discomfort, diversity torture, most unexpected from an interview in the oak-panelled corridors of local government.
The most interesting mayor in Aotearoa, K Gurunathan will not stand again in this year’s council elections.
His announcement, the ostensible reason for this n-bombed interview, comes too late for many people to truly savour the gonzo sensibilities of a Malaysian-Indianmayorwho arrived in Aotearoa in the mid-70s and promptly joined Māori activist groupNgā Tamatoa.
Usually, every I’m-not-seekingre-election story follows the same bland strains of self-congratulation, but Gurunathan, pushing 70 and standing at the river mouth looking back, could never just leave it at bland.
If life’s a river, then the king tides of history in the last half-century – the clashing cultures, religions, identities – foaming with politics and violence, have all flowed over the black skin of the man sitting in the corner office of the Kāpiti Coast District Council HQ.
He will depart a nationwide crop of mayors that boasts more Smiths – Bruce, Grant, Graham and Jason – than names of Asian heritage combined.
He tells a story he really wants to share.
In 2016, the newly elected mayor of the Kāpiti Coast stood near a block of shops in Paraparaumu, waiting for his son, who was inside a dairy buying something. A woman peeled away from the passers-by and headed towards him with the kind of shark-like purpose that makes your stomach sink.
This woman, he says, complained to him that he had sold her old stock, past its use-by date. ‘‘I listened to her, and it clicked. She thought I owned the dairy.’’
Gurunathan does not, in fact, own a dairy. He is in no way a retailer of anything except ideas, he says. Was there any way to avoid this embarrassment other than wearing his mayoral chains 24/7? And even then, it makes you wonder.
‘‘Ya gotta laugh,’’ is Gurunathan’s queasy approach tomost matters of race. But to hear thisman of Indian heritage assume the accent of a whiteman imitating an Indianman is painful (and funny) as he explains his response to the expired-stock woman.
Peter Sellers, the long-dead Hollywood star, did a particularly vile imitation of an Indian person in the 1968 film The Party. Gurunathan has perfected an imitation of Sellers’ fake accent (‘‘I learned how to speak like an Indian thanks to Peter Sellers,’’ he says with ice-cold irony), and he used it in his reply.
‘‘Apologies,’’ he said to the woman. ‘‘I may be looking like an Indian, and that is being a dairy, but I amnot owning the dairy.’’
The woman, slowly realising what she had done, turned and bolted. She did not even go to the dairywith the offending stock, he says.
Retelling – and revelling in – this story is the way Gurunathan dealswith this kind of stuff. ‘‘It’s using the stereotype to subvert it. You have fun with it, eh? What else do you do?’’
Was she being racist? Gurunathan is willing to cut her some slack. ‘‘I don’t think so, because you aggregate things. A lot of Indians own dairies. I look like an Indian, that was a dairy. One and one equals three.’’
He does like this story, though, because it encapsulates the complications of race in Aotearoa.
Gurunathan’s racial battles, to be fair, have not always been about expired products. There was apartheid too.
Let us remember the establishment figures of the violent 1981 Springbok tour. Their overcoats might look threadbare now, and quaint, and the biceps that once flexed manfully beneath the sleeves will be faded; their truncheons discarded for seven irons. But back in the day they used to be somebody – well, a Red Squad of somebodies.
In 1981 when the tour ruffled a lot of feathers, squads of police – named red and blue – were set up to deal with the unruly protesters. Fully kitted out, they looked like everything else from the 70s and 80s, as though they’d stepped out of the props department of DoctorWho.
The cops arrived at Hamilton’s Rugby Park on July 25 and lost control: a case of organised violence subsumed by angry chaos. Anti-tour protesters made it on to the field, and the Springbok game against Waikato was cancelled.
In 1981, Gurunathan was with the group of about 500 protesters that rolled to the middle of the pitch, like troops landing at Normandy, facing waves of Hamiltonians behaving like the kind of provincial ogres that usually exist only in caricature. These ogres ate caricatures – washed them down with quarts of Waikato Draught.
A rock flew through the air in slow motion, landing on the head of the person in front of Gurunathan – this was Halt All Racist Tours (Hart) leader JohnMinto, who got the wobbles.
Here’s a classic Gurunathanism: he believes that Minto blamed a flying beer can for the attack because of its cultural symbolism: more compelling that weaponised Kiwiana clobber him, than a rock. Eitherway, I’m willing to excuse Minto’s confusion due to his head injury.
Gurunathan and another man carried the dazed Minto for first aid help outside. By then, the crowd was getting more violent, and two cops nearby were packing up their truncheons and hitting the road. ‘‘What freaked me out was the sergeant telling another cop, ‘Look, the crowds are coming, just look after yourself and get out of here.’ ’’
Gurunathan and his wife, Claire, sensing potential beatings from vengeful rugby fans, scrambled to his cream Volkswagen Beetle – smartly parked nearby – and got the hell out too.
Consider this question: How did this self-proclaimed plantation n-word end up being chased out of Fountain City, Hamilton? Gurunathan says he was born from rebels. Afamily that escaped oppression.
‘‘My background is Malaysian; Malaysian being [the] nationality. And I’m of Indian origin. My father’s side – indentured labourers from India who were brought in to build the rubber plantations; my mother’s side . . . from Sri Lanka, Tamil Sri Lankans, but from different castes.
‘‘They fell in love and they eloped to Malaya [now peninsular Malaysia]. So that part of the story in the family has always been the rebels, breaking traditions.’’
Colonialism has left a dent on this mayor who, when he took his oath of citizenship in 2009, did it in te reo Māori to ‘‘escape the angst’’ of swearing an oath to the Queen in her own language.
He gives a simple rundown of plantation economics 101. What the plantation economy does, he says, is bring the labourers in, and gives them just enough of an education so they can follow orders and do the basic arithmetic required of the job. ‘‘You need them to breed the next level of plantation paid slaves. You also have the . . . palmwine, theywork hard, they get drunk, they go back home and beat theirwives.’’
His dad, Krisnasamy, escaped the plantation life, using the primary schoollevel education he received to gain a government job. Gurunathan himselfwas born in Kuala Lumpur, where his father and mother, Pakiam, had moved.
‘‘So, you go to school, you’re a minority, and also we’re the blackest. And the plantation identity, stereotyping was still in the urban areas . . . luckily for me, my elder brothers were in the same school. They were all fighters, so I could hide in the shadow of my brothers. Otherwise you can’t survive. Racial discrimination was there.’’
So it was that Gurunathan, seeking tertiary education but excluded by a quota on Indian student numbers in Malaysia, flew into Wellington in the mid70s. New Zealand was the cheapest option for international study, he says. He had $200 in his pocket, cheap accommodation and a simmering awareness of injustice.
In 1975 hewas invited by a friend to meet ‘‘these big guys’’ – members of a group called Ngā Tamatoa. This roopu became one of the defining champions of things Māori in the 70s and 80s. They were renowned, staunch and, at the time, young. ‘‘When I came here, I heard their story for the first time – what has happened to the Māori, and it clicked. I started attending the meetings on the weekends, and they acceptedme as part of their group.’’
His experiences were an honour-roll of events for the Māori cause in Aotearoa. His first stay on amarae was at Raglan. That was as part of the Eva Rickard-led occupation of iwi land taken for defence during World War II and never returned.
After the war it became a golf club. Gurunathan went to the Bastion Point [Takaparawhau] occupation twice, and joined theMāori Land March from Porirua to Parliament.
We are a bicultural nation, he says, within which we have amulticultural society. The Treaty gives an umbrella for multicultural rights – non-Māori minority groups often did not fully grasp the value of the document for them, he says.
Gurunathan worked for much of his adult life as a journalist, back in Malaysia, and in Aotearoa, particularly in the Kāpiti community, where he gained the profile that won him a council seat. After two terms as a councillor, and two as mayor, he plans to hang out with his first grandchild, who is 10 months old, and write.
I like Gurunathan, but I have never been able to understand him. All the contradictions – and that way he has of starting a funny story that turns into something terrible while you’re still laughing. It’s biting, deliberate, stream-ofconsciousness racial satire.
He begins a story about how tough it is to get a decent photograph on his driver’s licence. Gurunathan always looks like a tiny ‘‘black blob’’ to any police officer on a routine traffic stop. Before my chuckles dry up, he has jumped to his successful mayoral campaign.
He could not take the risk of his billboards looking like his licence, he says. ‘‘And then, when you’re looking at one vote, two votes, three votes’ difference, there’s the supplemental campaign you’ve got to think of. Do I scare them?’’
So he lightened his skin on his billboards. ‘‘I had to tone my blackness down. How do you handle that one?’’
It was not about wanting to be white, he says after a long silence, but toning down his blackness to get to the other side. The other side in Kāpiti is a set of chains that, until Gurunathan arrived, were only ever worn by Pākehā.
Once, Gurunathan saw a film about Gandhi’s time in South Africa, where protesters pushed forward against thuggish police, each line whacked on the head, falling down like reeds in the wind but always replaced by a new line.
‘‘You take it. I took that. That was a blow. Was I a sell-out? People be the judge.’’