True Brits very strange mix of blended DNA
With Waitangi Day once again behind us it’s fun to ask the perennial question: what is a Maori?
It’s a fun game, especially when people describe themselves as light-skinned Maori and we see red-heads leading a haka for the Maori All Blacks. Yet a better question is, what is an Englishman, or in a New Zealand context a Pakeha?
Perhaps, if you hail from Blighty, you think you know what an Englishman is. But do you?
The original English were Celts who practised druidism before being subjugated by Romans to become the Romano-British, who were pagans then Christian and spoke Latin, mostly. Brittonic languages endured and enjoyed a brief revival after the fall of Rome.
These Romano British Celts were violently cast aside by the Anglo-Saxons around 600AD. Some historians believe that these invaders embraced a real rape-culture against the womenfolk and murdered or exiled the men. So comprehensive was this invasion that barely 20 words from the original Brittonic languages were adopted by the invaders.
The old religion was displaced by Thor and Woden, with only remnants of the original culture struggling on in Cornwall and Wales. Yet the DNA of the conquered lived on, even as their culture was eviscerated.
The descendants of this miasma were the basis of the Saxon kingdoms that embraced St Augustine and the church, fought the Vikings to a standstill before absorbing them and finally falling under Norman yoke when William the Bastard earned his moniker William the Conqueror.
Who are the English?
We worship a God who hails from the Middle East. We speak a collection of German, Latin and French, our queen descends from a long line of Germans and our bloodline is a cosmopolitan vampire smoothie.
There is no such thing as an Englishman. Yet here we are. World champions at empirebuilding, linguistic colonisation and darts. Perhaps the one defining feature of being English is a willingness to adapt, adopt and embrace other cultures.
We even have a term, ‘‘going native’’ to describe one of our tribe who embraces a local culture, and we absorb effortlessly those from other lands who wish to become and define themselves as being one of us.
So who are we, this lost tribe, the flotsam and jetsam of a fallen empire abandoned at the end of the civilised world who swear on a Bible written by Greeks, who order Thai food and use Arabic numbers to try to define who is and isn’t a Maori?