The mourning after: A look back at dawn raids
Exhibition shines light on bleak slice of our past, writes Dionne Christian
It was a bleak chapter in New Zealand’s history. Now The Dawn Raids — Educate to Liberate is open at O¯ tara’s Fresh Gallery — its first stop in the North Island on a nationwide tour — to tell the story to a wide audience especially as many young people don’t know about it.
Forty-five years on, musician Tigilau Ness remembers being stopped by police while walking to and from work or around his Ponsonby neighbourhood.
A member of social-justice organisation the Polynesian Panthers, New Zealand-born Ness, the son of Niuean immigrants and then only 19, says when word broke in the early 1970s about new immigration policies and police tactics to hunt down overstayers, he and his fellow Panthers took action.
They saw it as unfair and racist because Europeans weren’t targeted by police and immigration officials would arrive at homes in the early morning or stop people on the street and demand to see proof of their right to be here.
The early morning visits were dubbed dawn raids.
“We were told to be polite to the police, to answer their questions and to try not to be bush lawyers,” says Ness, “but we knew the police didn’t really know much about us so we’d give them false names.”
The award-winning reggae musician, father of hip hop artist Che Fu and long-time socialjustice worker who now facilitates a parenting programme in Ma¯ngere East, Ness’ favoured pseudonym was Alisana Saepelu — meaning Alexander the Great Bushknife, the latter based on the Niuean word for sword.
Ness never expected to one day contribute to an exhibition touring museums and art galleries about the bleak chapter in New Zealand’s history.
“We were just standing up for the rights of our people because we knew we didn’t want New Zealand to be another South Africa,” says Ness, who admits his widowed mother, Moka, disapproved of his activities because she thought he would wind up in trouble and in jail. “I felt vindicated at the exhibition opening and Mum, she finally said to me that she now understood what I’d been doing all those years ago.” Developed by teacher and author Pauline Smith and Southland Museum and Art Gallery, the exhibition explores the dawn raids of the 1970s and early 80s. Smith, author of the book My New Zealand Story: Dawn Raid, says researching and writing her book made her want to tell the story to a wider audience especially because many younger people didn’t know about it.
“If you don’t know about something, you can’t decide how you feel about it. It also lessens the chance that it will happen again,” says Smith. “I really want to show the younger generation, in particular, a bigger picture because I think that helps to create better citizens.”
It’s a view shared by Ness who’s heartened to see young people out on the streets today protesting about climate change: “We were the same age when we started and we helped to make a difference.”
While not related to it, The Dawn Raids — Educate to Liberate coincides with the Mandela: My Life exhibition now on at Eden Park.
Ness, jailed for his part in Springbok tour protests of 1981, says the Polynesian Panthers also saw Mandela, then a jailed human-rights activist, as a role model.
He met him in 1995 when Mandela visited New Zealand as South Africa’s leader and thanked those who had supported protests to help overturn apartheid policies.