Tropicalities
p. 43 · Read in the full issue
Rumour wasn’t long in naming a new husband for Princess Siuilikutapu of Tonga, whose marriage to a commoner, Siosiua Liava’a, was annulled by King Taufa’ahau in December.
The favoured candidate is Minister of Police Akau’ola, one of the tew eligible land-owning matapule, or talking chiefs. He is in his mid 30’s, was educated overseas and was top of his class when he graduated from Hendon Police Training College in Britain. He has also denied that he is the Princess’ suitor.
A month after the big fuss that followed the Princess’ New Zealand marriage and its subsequent annul ment, public opinion in Tonga was still on the side of the King and authority. There is not, and never could be, so it is said in Tonga, a rift in the Royal Family. For them and the nobles, the King is still the sacred head, or Tui Tonga, as well as the temporal head. The King probably realises this better than his subjects and is said to have studied Shinto, as he sees a similarity be tween the Japanese and Tongan at titude to the monarch.
On a more plebeian plane, most people felt that the Princess would have been letting the side down to have gone on with the marriage but that Siosiua Liava’a “might have got away with it” if he had played his cards better. Two ministers in the Tongan cabinet—posts usually re served for nobles—are commoners but they went to university, applied themselves and got worthwhile de grees, Siosiua doesn’t show any signs of doing anything of the sort although he graduated at the top of the class from Tonga High School and got a government scholarship to study at university in NZ.
His passion, apart from that for the Princess, is for Rugby football.
He has applied for a permit to stay in New Zealand and work but it was unlikely that he would get finality about this until the end of January.
Meantime, since the proclamation of annulment, there has been a masterly silence from all official circles in Tonga; and not a peep out of the legal eagles who might have been expected to pronounce on the international validy of the act. So far as New Zealand was concerned.