Niuatoputapu in Matamata

On New Year's day we were saddened but also honoured to drive to Matamata, where doubly exiled & gravely ill Saia Unga lies in his daughter's living room, surrounded & comforted by a sea of loving family members. Saia is one of the last of the technician-adventurers that Tonga deployed to its remote islands to run radio communications bases in the '50s & '60s.

The first of the photos I have posted here shows Saia's friend, the legendary poet Kitione Mamata, standing by his radio post on Niuafo'ou in 1968. Saia was stationed for 20 years in a hut in Niuatoputapu, the other main island of the remote Niua archipelago; the two men would gossip & joke with each other across waves of static & ocean.

I got to know Saia Unga in 2013, when I lived across the road from him in Nuku'alofa. I remember the old man lying in a hammock hung from a mango tree beside his front fence. A beatific smile was written across his face for hours, as he gazed at a map of distant Niuatoputapu.

The contribution of men like Saia 'Unga & Kitione Mamata to the transformation of Tonga should not be underestimated. As technicians on islands that lacked cars & electricity, they were regarded with something like awe. Some used their status to educate, & to agitate.

During his years on Niuafo'ou Kitione Mamata befriended the islands' low-ranking inhabitants, & wrote a series of kava songs that expressed, in the elliptical style of language Tongans call heliaki, their poverty & alienation. Radio brought these songs to the whole kingdom.

Wendy Pond spent years in the Niuas, studying the region's insects, esoteric religious traditions, & poetry. In a classic essay she analysed & decoded Mamata's songs, & celebrated their proletarian defiance of Tonga's ruling elite. When I talked the elderly Wendy Pond several years ago, she insisted that Tonga's pro-democracy movement had begun in the Niuas, with Mamata's songs.

Even in retirement, under his mango tree in Nuku'alofa, Saia retained the independent streak that he & Mamata had shown as young men. He ostentatiously read Ko e Kelea, the paper of Tonga's Democratic Party, for example.

It was a pleasure to listen to Saia's stories about his Niuan homeland, under that tree in Nuku'alofa.