Kua Wahangu te Pukorero

Te Ao Hou, December 1966, Page 5

Kua Wahangu te Pukorero When Chief Hetekia te Kani te Ua, O.B.E., died suddenly and peacefully at his home at Tower House, Puha, near Gisborne, a mighty totara fell in the forests of Tane and the reverberations of its crashing were felt through the worlds of the Maori and the Pakeha. Throughout Maoridom the news swept, accompanied by a sense of dismay which bordered on unbelief. He had been so familiar a figure on almost every important marae and on every important occasion for so long that he had come to be regarded as the very embodiment of Maori etiquette and ceremonial procedure and as an almost eternal figure impervious to the laws of change and age. By descent, by training and by years of constant and undeviating service, Te Kani was demonstrably of the upoko ariki—one had only to see him on the marae, his grizzled locks waving in the breeze, his mako ear-rings with their long, pendant, black ribbons, and his famous walking stick of twisted vine with its stag-horn handle flourished vehemently to illustrate some point he wished to drive home. He might—except for his modern clothes—have stepped from the more picturesque past. continued on page 32