New Zealand’s Maori chiefs yesterday anointed a 27-year-old queen as their new monarch, a surprise choice hailed as a symbol of change for the country’s indigenous community.
Nga Wai hono i te po Paki was cheered by thousands as she ascended a high-backed wooden throne during an elaborate ceremony in Ngaruawahia.
She is the youngest daughter of King Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII, who died on Friday last week after heart surgery.
Photo: AFP
After being elected by a council of chiefs, Nga Wai was ushered to the throne by a phalanx of bare-chested and tattooed men bearing ceremonial weapons who chanted, screamed and shouted in acclamation.
The queen, wearing a wreath of leaves, a cloak and a whalebone necklace, sat beside her father’s coffin as emotive rites, prayers and chants were performed. After six days laid in state, the late king was carried down the Waikato River as part of a flotilla of four war canoes, each powered by more than a dozen rowers.
His funerary procession passed throngs of onlookers camped on the riverbanks, before stopping at the foot of Mount Taupiri.
Photo: AFP / Kiingitanga
From there, three rugby union teams acted as pallbearers, shepherding his coffin up steep slopes to the summit and the final resting place of Maori royals.
The Maori monarch is a mostly ceremonial role with no legal status, but it has enormous cultural and sometimes political significance as a potent symbol of identity and kinship.
As the king’s only daughter and his youngest child, Queen Nga Wai was considered an outside choice to become his successor.
One of her two elder brothers had taken on many ceremonial duties during their father’s periods of ill health and had been widely tipped to take over.
Queen Nga Wai is the eighth Maori monarch and the second queen. Her grandmother, Queen Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, held the position for four decades until 2006.
“It is certainly a break from traditional Maori leadership appointments which tend to succeed to the eldest child, usually a male,” Maori cultural adviser Karaitiana Taiuru told reporters.
Taiuru said it was a “privilege” to witness a young Maori woman become queen, particularly given the ageing leadership and mounting challenges faced by the community.
“The Maori world has been yearning for younger leadership to guide us in the new world of AI [artificial intelligence], genetic modification, global warming and in a time of many other social changes that question and threaten us and indigenous peoples of New Zealand,” he said. “These challenges require a new and younger generation to lead us.”
The kiingitanga, or Maori king movement, was founded in 1858 to unite New Zealand’s tribes and provide a single counterpart to the colonial ruler, Britain’s Queen Victoria.
“People think Maori people are one nation — we’re not. We’re many tribes, many iwi. We have different ways of speaking out,” said Joanne Teina, who traveled from Auckland for the ceremony. “The kiingitanga was created to create unity — among people who were fighting each other for thousands of years, before pakeha [Europeans] came along.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver