Puzzled Tongans

Even There They Are Sick Of Controls

From Our Own Correspondent

Nuku’Alofa, Nov. 22.

OUR Government has added to its long list of “bans and restrictions” a recent regulation banning the sale or barter of coconuts.

It is difficult to find any motive for this except, perhaps, it is to do away with the harmless practice of some Ton gans of selling pan-cakes for coconuts and paying in coconuts for the hire of trucks to bring the coconuts from their plantations to their homes. One fails to see any evil in such transactions, so far as it relates to copra production.

Whether the coconuts go to pan-cake vendors, or remain in the hands of would-be buyers, they ultimately will be reduced to copra and sold to the Copra Board.

Where owners of distant plantations are without carts or other means of bringing their nuts to their homes to be made into copra, it is convenient and economical for them to hire trucks to do that work, in exchange for coconuts — otherwise the nuts are left to sprout and waste on their plantations.

Baffled by the intricate machinery of Government, the poor Tongan tax-payers dumbly look on in puzzled bewilderment, wondering whether this is a manifesta tion of that freedom so often promised to the citizens of the world by the great statesmen of the powerful nations during the war years. In their faikavas (kava parties) they furtively ask whether this is the tau’ataina (freedom) which the Konisitutone (that magic word to the Tongan—Constitution) speaks of.

Perhaps the situation may be summed up in these words of an old Tongan chief; “Seuke. koe kuonga kuo faikehe hotau kuonga ni,” which literally means, “The time in which we are now living is a strange one indeed.”

Miss Pam Bakewell, of Rabaul, married Mr. M. Foley, Patrol-Officer, Talasea, New Britain, on January 3.