He asked his friends to sit wherever they liked around his kava bowl, and encouraged them to discuss both the political and economic problems of Tonga, as well as the philosophical conundrums he had encountered in Sydney. Inspired by the boozy and disputatious gatherings of the Push and by the symposia of ancient Greece, Helu set up a new sort of kava circle after returning to Tonga in 1963. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Helu had studied at the University of Sydney, where he befriended the classicist, philosopher and political provocateur John Anderson, and became part of the circle of bohemians known as the Sydney Push. Helu’s Fofo’anga clubs popularised a new way of enjoying kava. Almost every important public event in Tonga, whether it is a wedding or a funeral or a coronation, still involves ritualised kava drinking, where highly ranked men – royals, nobles, local chiefs – are seated close to the bowl, and long, decorous speeches are made. Futa Helu, Tonga’s most important modern intellectual, thought of Fofo’anga when he set up a network of clubs where people could, in return for a small donation, sit, talk and consume kava, a drink made with cold water and the ground roots of the piper methysticum plant.įor hundreds of years, and possibly much longer, kava had been consumed by Tongan men at carefully organised ceremonies. Forty years ago, the yard had been the site of one of the first Fofo’anga clubs.įofo’anga is the Tongan word for pumice stones – light, porous, pink-white things – that wash up on the beaches of the kingdom’s 170 islands. A small boy would open the door and wordlessly exchange ‘Atenisi’s ten pa’anga note for a bag of brown powder.Īcross the road from my drug house was a yard in which dozens of concrete pillars, foundations of an invisible house, rose a few feet through weeds, and pigs gnawed watermelon scalps. Halfway down Tupoulahi Road, on the eastern side of Nuku’alofa, I would knock on the door of a fibrolite cottage with cardboard in its windows. I would come home from my last class of the week, shower and change into a fresh tupenu (Tongan skirt) and then walk out to buy a bag of drugs with my employer’s money. When I worked at the ‘Atenisi Institute, a small and poor university on the outskirts of Nuku’alofa, the capital and indeed only city of the Kingdom of Tonga, most of my Friday evenings began the same way.
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