Footprints of History The Religion Of Kereopa Te Rau

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 175, 21 April 1937, Page 13

Footprints of History The Religion Of Kereopa Te Rau

A BLOT ON MAORI HISTORY Black Mass Was Celebrated At St. Stephen’s, Opotiki

(By

Stephen Gerard.)

Shafts of sunlight through the nar-' row windows slanted across the sombre nave, lit the faces of earnest worshippers. Now the congregation knelt, and the little wooden church filled with the subdued murmur of prayer: now the congregation stood, and the roof rang with loud music and pealing psalm; now the congregation sat, and the white-robed minister entered the pulpit, and his clear impassioned voice cut across the stillness and held the attention of all in the church save me. For I had noticed several things that caught my fancy. The wooden pulpit Itself was of great age, its bare wood dark with the years, and here and there blotched with brown stains. Above the pulpit, in a case on the wall, was a chalice of old pewter, or perhaps of time-dulled silver. And on the floor of the chancel I saw that there was a grave, and over it a brass plate engraved, us I found afterward, with ■the name of Karl Sylvius Volkner. The typical small-town congregation consisted largely of women, middleaged, comfortable, undisturbed by any unpleasant thought of the sinister ghosts that must walk betimes under that ancient roof-free. The shop-keep-ers and farmers, and the melancholyeyed Maoris, listened raptly to the parson’s voice. But I—l was thinking of a service that was held long ago in that same church of St. Stephen flic Martyr’s, at Opotiki. on March 2. 1865, such a service as no church in New Zealand ever saw before or since, the Black Mass of Kereopa te Rau. High Priest of Pai Marire. This Kereopa was a Bay of Plenty chief, who was inspired by the preaching of Te Ua, originator of the faith of ' Pai Marire. Of that faith Kereopa be- I came the self-appointed high priest. ( emissary to the Urewera and Whakatane tribes. Contemporary pictures show him as a round-faced, bearded man with a shock of wild hair, and a somewhat stupid and cruel expression heightened by rhe heavily-drawn lines of his sparse tattooing. The new faith was directed against the pakeha. To attain fame it was essential for a priest of Pai Marire to have slain a pakeha, whose head would hang at the base of his Hauhau flagstaff, with the red flag of Riki flying over it, and his crazed devotees dancing around. Kereopa’s hands, however, were as yet unstained by pakeha blood. His mana was small among the priests of Pai Marire. He was but one of many chiefs who, discontented with changing conditions, were striving to have the pakeha ejected from the land Kereopa went through the Bay of Plenty country, the East Coast, and the Urewera; but the tribes did not rise, as he had hoped, to follow the red flag of Riki. “It must be that I lack mana as a prophet,” he reflected. “I must have a pakeha head!” For the head of a Captain Lloyd, killed at Te Ahuahu fight, had been smoked and carried throughout the country, and everywhere the tribes had followed it. It was tangible and concrete evidence of Riki's powers. It was consulted as an oracle, after an old-time Maoriland tradition, and from Te Ua had come the pronouncement that it had prophesied the utter annihiliation of all enemies of the new red gods. Wanted —A White Man’s Head. So Kereopa must have such another oracle. He took himself first to Te Teko, and demanded the life of the European miller, Aubrey. The natives of Te Teko would not give Aubrey up to him, so he went next to Whakatane, and set up his flagpole with its flamboyant scarlet banner flapping bravely in the wind. His followers danced around, howling the weird gibberish Kereopa had taught them. Then Kereopa told the Whakatane chiefs of the great deeds that had been foretold, and the downfall of the pakeha; and to make a start, said he, let them give him the Roman Catholic priest, Father Grange, who had a mission at Whakatane. But the chiefs refused. Skirting the shores of Ohiwa Harbour, Kereopa and his band of fanatics came to Opotiki. The church was not then, as now, situated in the middle of a busy street, with houses ranged on either hand as far as eye can see. It stood alone, the finest building in the village, and around it a cluster of thatched whares, and the bush trees, gnarled karaka and ancient pohutukawa and tall, stately totara. In the background the weatherboard shanties of the Europeans looked strangely out of place. There were two missionaries then stationed at Opotiki, Mr. Grace and Mr. Volkner. Kereopa told the local chief, Mokomoko, that these two were ploting against the Maoris. At that particular time they were absent; Kereopa said that they had gone to report on the movements of the Maoris, to arrange for the soldiery to come to Opotiki. “There will be no safety

while they live,” he assured bis hearers. “I will give them into your hands,” answered Mokomoko. On the fifth day rose the cry of ••Sail-oh!" and a schooner stood into the river mouth, worked upstream and moored against the bank. There were two Jews on board, and the German Volkner and Mr. Grace. When they saw Mokomoko they hailed him in friendly style, but he betrayed them. He bound them before they even set foot ashore. His men accompanied the missionaries inland to the church, ami gave them up to Kereopa. The prophet’s brow was dark under his tottooed owl-eyebrows. “Mr. Volkner must die,” he said. At peril of rousing the fanatics’ anger. Mr. Grace pleaded for Volkner’s life. He was told curtly that be, too, was destined to hang. But he went practically unguarded, for it was on Volkner that the flood of Hauhau hatred was outpoured, and Mr. Grace, when he saw that the position was hopeless, found opportunity to slip away 'and seek safety for himself. Kereopa was angry when be heard that Grace had gone. Two heads, be thought, would have been better than one.

At Kereopa’s command, the Maoris took Karl Sylvius Volkner, the mild and kindly man of God, and hanged him from' a pohutukawa tree. They say that pohutukawa never flowered again. Kereopa’s Black Mass.

Then the church bell rang, its clear, sweet notes calling, as they had so often before, a congregation to worship. But this time it was to worship the red god Riki, who had never been revered in any church before. Clad in the garments of the murdered man, with Volkner’s watch-chain glittering against Volkner’s waistcoat of black, Kereopa te Rau led the way into the church. He donned the black cassock and the white surplice and he mounted the pulpit and set the severed head on the reading desk beside him. Then the church rocked with the senseless howling that was the Hauhau substitute for song. Then, up and down the wide aisle, danced the bloodcrazed devotees of the devil’s creed. Then, at Kereopa’s behest, took place the impious communion of the Black Mass, and the consecrated chalice was passed from lip to lip, but the wine they drank was not the juice of grapes, nor the host any bread baked by man. From that day Kereopa had a new name, Kai Whatu, Eater of Men’s Eyes. But Kereopa choked id the pulpit, and was overtaken by a violent fit of coughing, and a murmur went around “It is an omen!” So, indeed, it was. Kereopa went from that place a doomed man. Many were the deeds of evil he wrought in the next six years, slaying Maori and pakeha in his fanatical zeal, and even "plotting to take the life of Bishop Williams of Waiapu. But all the time he knew that his time was short; the pakeha would never forgive him, even if God were to do so; there was a price of £lOOO on his head, and he took refuge among the incorruptible people of the Urewera, tribes sworn to make no peace with the pakeha. i Atonement. In 1871 the end came. Colonel Porter and the Ngatiporou chief, Major Ropata Wahawaha, were scouring the Ruatoki country in pursuit of Te Kooti. A scout. Te Whiu, reported seeing Kereopa at the Urewera village of Manawarua. With Colonel Porter and a small party of scouts, Te Whiu found the Hauhau prophet sitting outside a whare in a bush clearing. Warned by that sixth sense granted to hunted animals and fugitive men, Kereopa took fright and bolted for the bush. Te Whin panted at his heels. The hurrying white men came up in time to see the murderer borne to the ground. They marched him back by way of Waikaremoana to Wairoa, and he was taken to Napier and put on trial. The issue was never in doubt. Although Kereopa tried to cheat the hangman by suicide, he was thwarted and sent to the scaffold. “It is the fulfilment of the Opotiki omen,” he said with resignation. So within the memory of living men, the last cannibal died. At Opotiki, the township has grown up around the little church, which early prints depict as standing alone on an open plain. The respectable and sober townsfolk, the quiet country people, go to matins there, and peaceful modern Maoris who have forgotten the warlike ways of their fathers. “Well for all of you,” I thought as I watched the congregation at their devotions; “well for your peace of mind that you have no thoughts of yesterday, that you need never come here alone at night, that the desecrated chalice is left in its niche on the wall. For who knows what of evil he might inherit who lifted it to his lips!” But while I was so thinking, I woke to the fact that all but 1 were on their feet, and the cheerful music was playing. now loud, now low, and the voices of the people filled the church with the reverent plea of the Nunc Dimittis: "Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace ...” (Saturday: The Outlaw Te Kooti.)