Coronation Will

Bring Hard Times

For Tonga's Pigs

From a Nukualofa correspondent MANY people in Tonga have been wondering lately whether there will be any pigs left in the kingdom when the festivities for the coronation of King Taufa’ahau are over.

The festivities will last a week, and 2,000 guests and visitors are expected to partake in the daily feasting. They should make some pretty serious inroads on Tonga’s pig population and other food supplies.

To cater for the coronation feasts, the Tongans have planted special food crops and have been raising pigs and poultry as fast as they can go. Meanwhile, fish and turtles have been caught and are being held in traps for coronation week.

During that week, great earthen ovens will each day cook a thousand pigs and a thousand head of poultry, plus mutton, beef, fish, turtle steaks, crayfish and crabs.

Several tons of yams, kumara, breadfruit and taro will accom pany bananas and plantains.

Exotic Tongan dishes will in clude lupulu, chicken, duck, and turkey cooked in coconut cream, and creamed raw fish (ota). To accompany these, there will be

tastefully decorated salads of tomato, lettuce, cucumber, celery and young spring onions.

Oranges, mandarins, huge water melons, papaws and young drink ing coconuts will be there in abun dance.

Groups of dancers with 80 to 200 men and women in each, have been practising for months to perfect traditional dances and learn new ones composed for the occasion.

Great choirs will accompany the dancers, and each island will vie with the other to produce the best.

Dancers busy

Among the dances to be seen are the me’etu’upaki, danced by old chiefs in front of the temple to please the gods; the lakalaka, which tells a story with each movement—women on the left, men on the right; and the tafi (sweep) in which men and women sit to perform.

In the vaka-eke, only the men dance. They face one another in two rows, in pairs. This is a stick dance which originated in the outer islands.

Thirty to 40 commercial aircraft are expected in the kingdom dur ing coronation week. In addition, there will be a number of charter and air force planes bringing special visitors and high digni taries from many countries.

To help out during this busy period, the Fiji Government has agreed to send an air traffic officer to assume control of airport opera tions.