Tonga Goes Formal!
p. 46 · Read in the full issue
Letter to the Editor
WHEN Beatrice Grimshaw wrote her “Those Wonderful Nations’’ she called Tonga the land of comic operas. Since then Tonga has changed, and comic operas have made place for farces and heavy dramas, of which the dramatis personae are villains.
The good old days (I am speaking of 60 years ago) in Tonga, when men could go to public dances in soft white shirts and starched white drill suits, are things of the past. Tonga is passing through a ridiculous phase wherein black dress suits (swallow tails) are worn at hot and stuffy dances.
“Clothes do not make the man” is true all the world over, with the exception of Tonga, where clothes do make the man.
A recent visitor to Tonga, who wit nessed a dance in Nukualofa, said: “You people in Tonga are mad, wearing black dress suits on a hot night (100 deg.
Fahrenheit). What would people say in London if anybody appeared in a ball room in a white drill, suit on a cold and frosty night?”
Mark Twain did appear in a white flannel suit, on such a night, but he was Mark Twain!
I do not ridicule or condemn our grow ing tendency to wear evening clothes in the evening—it is refreshing to take a bath and put on clothes other than those worn during the daily work. Black dress suits are not the most comfortable gar ments for tropical evenings, but in the past we had no tailors here who could make a white shell jacket, and our store keepers were not enterprising enough to stock soft-fronted shirts for evening wear.
However, we turn up at picnics so fear fully and wonderfully garbed that nobody could accuse us of paying too much attention to our personal appearance.
A writer, Jerome K. Jerome, I believe, has confessed that in his youth he attempted the improvement of his moral character, but as he grew older he gave up trying to improve himself, and turned his attention to the improvement of the characters of other people—it was easier, and he got more credit for it.
'The powers-that-be here in Tonga have nobly given up the attempt to reform themselves in order that they may have greater time to devote to the reformation of us. And we are duly grateful—at least, most of us are.
I am, etc.,
Haapai, Tonga.
October, 1944.